Linux mint Sudoers edit not working: can't do anything

Question

I am running Linux Mint. I set up an administrator account called 'thomas'.

I am trying to edit some files and it will only let me open them as read only. I assumed a permissions problem. As such, I sought to give myself the correct permissions.

I added my user to the group sudo (it was already in the group admin). In sudoers these groups have all permissions. However, this did not work so I added an entry specifically for my username to give it all permissions. Again, this has not worked.

As such, at the moment I can log in as root or put sudo in front of every command to get things working, but this is not ideal and does not help when, for example, I open up a document for editing in Gedit within the GUI.

Could anyone advise as to why my permission changes are not working?

Answer 1

This is from my Red Hat-based desktop knowledge:

In a terminal do su and then visudo and then scroll down and look for:

root    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

Press i so you're in insert mode. Copy/paste the above line and replace root with your username, leave the rest as it is.

Answer 2

Do you mean you can not edit files in /home/thomas without sudo? In that case change the ownership/permission of the files with chown and chmod respectively.

Editing files elsewhere on the file system will normally require administrative privileges.

Answer 3

Try backing up your /etc/sudoers file (su -c 'mv /etc/sudoers /etc/sudoers.bkup') then uninstalling and reinstalling sudo (su -c 'apt-get remove sudo && apt-get install sudo')

When su -c asks for a password, it is asking for root password.

While I don't recommend doing this, it may be possible if you change the uid for thomas to 0. This should be possible with sudo vim /etc/passwd (use whatever file editor you use).

Answer 4

Fix permissions within user thomas: (as Thor suggested)

find /home/thomas -type f -exec sudo chown thomas:thomas {} \;
find /home/thomas -type d -exec sudo chown thomas:thomas {} \;

find /home/thomas -type f -exec sudo chmod 640 {} \;
find /home/thomas -type d -exec sudo chmod 750 {} \;

Important:

Files not located in /home/thomas will not have permissions for you to edit without sudo.

This is normal! It's critical for maintaining a safe running system.