[SOLVED] Initial user privileges

[Zorlon]

Hey everyone,

I've run into an issue and it's bothering me because I can't seem to find a way to fix it... So I signed up just for that.

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 and I have only the initial user account created (and root, obviously).

Since the beginning of my installation of Ubuntu, I have been able to do most "root level" stuff without needing to use sudo or su (like running apt-get update, editing a config file, etc.). About three days ago, I somehow lost all of these privileges and pretty much just became a normal user. I was still part of the admin group and I've added my user to probably an unnecessary amount of other groups (even the root group) but I can't really do anything fun without becoming root first. It's not really a problem... typing a handful of characters, it's just annoying because I was used to it. (Note: I lost the access sometime after doing a "chmod" or two to a single directory in my home directory)

So, first question: Is something like "apt-get update" ONLY a root-level command? If so, then I guess I had just given myself root access (possibly through the root group?). I am aware that giving my account root access is not a good idea; It wasn't intentional, if that is what happened.

Second question: Even though I'm part of the "admin" group and have SOME privileges, I suddenly can't do things like mount a Windows Vista volume (which I could do so many times before). This particular occurrence happened after I edited the fstab to mount the volume on start up (which worked, twice... then stopped working and stopped me from mounting unless I "sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /media/disk" in the terminal)
And since I'm sure these are all pretty much related... I also lost the ability to edit pretty much every document on my computer now (I use vi). Again, I have to sudo all this crap, which used to never be the case and it's annoying.

I will be honest that I have just been having fun with Ubuntu, kind of tweaking things here or there and not actually backing anything up. Of course, I knew this might happen so I am prepared to format and reinstall if necessary.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I really really hope I'm not just totally missing something and/or sounding like an idiot. Thank you very much.

[Drunk_Mexican]

Ok I'm going to get at this the best I can. Root user (single user) by default is turned off in Ubuntu. So unless you set it up and logged in as root after you set it up, then you are not root. Also, Ubuntu uses sudo and not su -. each root level command you gives starts with sudo...unless you wanted to use su - for the ease of not needing to type it all the time in which case you can do sudo su -.

None of that applies though again, unless you set it up to do that.

apt-get update needs to have sudo to work in ubuntu.

So in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update

and in debian

su -
apt-get update

All administrative tasks in Ubuntu and in Linux in general require root. That includes updates and installation of new applications.

The bottom line is this, to know what went wrong I would need to know what you did in the first place. I can say this for sure though, if you ran apt-get update without sudo and it worked then something was changed.

[bigtomrodney]

I have been able to do most "root level" stuff without needing to use sudo or su (like running apt-get update, editing a config file, etc.).

Unless you were running as root this should not have been possible. You should only be able to update or upgrade as root. Now you can run the commands, but they should error out. Maybe if you were still running from the livecd you might have had some extended privileges, that's all I can think of.

[Zorlon]

Alright, fair enough. I wasn't booting from a LiveCD, so that's not the case.
But I guess I must have just ended up giving myself root level access.

I'll move on and just see if I can mess with things a little more, since I'm not too particularly worried about my system getting screwed up.

Thanks for your inputs.