I just installed debian and i have many problems - eviltoast

My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers. I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary. Grub takes very long to load with “welcome to grub” message. I just wanted a stable distro as arch broke and currupted my external ssd

  • tal@lemmy.today
    161·
    1 year ago

    My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers.

    I don’t know what behavior you are seeing.

    Install sudo, add the user to the sudo group, and log out and log back in again (okay, technically you could just sg sudo as that user rather than logging him out, but group privileges are assigned at login, and it’s probably easier to just log out).

    https://wiki.debian.org/sudo

    I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary.

    Normally running a command does execute a binary. You mean that you have to fully-specify the path to the binary, that it’s not in your PATH? Like, you’re typing /bin/ls rather than ls?

    It’s probably easier for people to understand what’s going on if you just paste the output you’re seeing and indicate what it is that you expected to see.

    • beirdobaggins@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      When installing Debian, it asks you for a root password. If you enter one then you will not be added to the sudo group automatically. If you skip entering a root password, you will be added to sudo.

      I always enter a root password and then once in the installed OS switch to the root account with su - then add my self to sudo with usermod -aG sudo beirdo-baggins

      Then reboot.

      • tal@lemmy.today
        12·
        1 year ago

        Debian’s got a sudo group, not a wheel group.

        EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. Arch might use the wheel group and Debian the sudo group, and if he just copied his Arch sudoers file over his Debian one, it would reference the wheel group and wouldn’t work.

        googles

        Yeah, Arch has wheel.

        https://linuxopsys.com/topics/add-user-to-sudoers-in-arch-linux

        EDIT2: I bet he tried to add his user account explicitly to /etc/sudoers rather than just adding the account to the sudo group and just got the syntax wrong in one way or another, as the syntax of sudoers isn’t terribly intuitive.

        • Pantherina@feddit.de
          1·
          1 year ago

          In english you can use “they” if you dont know the persons pronouns ;D also pretty sure OP is female

          But valid point, Debian is weird

          • tal@lemmy.today
            12·
            1 year ago

            In english you can use “they” if you dont know the persons pronouns

            You can, but you can also use “he”, as English has a masculine generic.

            But valid point, Debian is weird

            I think that most Linux distros are based on Debian these days, as Fedora, the other major “parent” distro, seems not to be doing super-well, so I’d guess that most distros are probably using the sudo group.

            https://distrowatch.com/images/other/distro-family-tree.png

            Slackware looks not very alive these days, so I don’t think that there’s much going on with the child distros there any more.

    • kevin@mander.xyz
      2·
      1 year ago

      Normally running a command does execute a binary.

      I’m not certain, but I’m wondering if OP means that new programs don’t automatically get a “desktop” app or whatever. I’m often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu

      • tal@lemmy.today
        2·
        1 year ago

        Offtopic, but I had no use for desktop files in general, as I launch stuff from the command line, but I finally discovered a wonderful use for them. Steam creates a desktop file for Steam games it installs. Steam itself is…not all that amazing as a launcher. Gives you the last five games launched in a contextual menu from a tray icon, and a list of games you can search through in the client interface after you bring up the window and move to the Library tab. However, you can set up rofi to use desktop files as completions (one sets it up to complete on “drun”), and then rofi can act as your Steam game launcher, which is great. I can just whack a keystroke to invoke rofi, and then type a few characters of the game I want and whack enter, and rofi will prioritize by last-invoked. Really nice not having to slog through the Steam interface.

        • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          In the Steam interface you should be able to sort by recently used, and hide anything that’s not installed. Might make it easier to find your games :)

          • tal@lemmy.today
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, I’ve used that, and the “lite” interface, but what I want is a fast, searchable list, no mouse involvement, just with a single key combination to bring up the search, and recent game stuff, and rofi with drun does all of that, which was pleasant.

        • kevin@mander.xyz
          2·
          1 year ago

          That’s basically how I use desktop files generally, the kde launch menu (similar to the old Windows “start”… I don’t know what it’s called) comes up when I tap super, and then I can start typing and find what I want to launch.

          You can set that up to run custom scripts, but all desktop files are there by default.

      • mariah@feddit.rocksOP
        11·
        1 year ago

        I meant, for example, i have to run /usr/sbin/smartctl instead of just smartctl

        • tal@lemmy.today
          1·
          1 year ago

          Okay. I have my config files set up to add /sbin and /usr/sbin to my PATH – that’s probably a config that dates back at least a decade – but it looks like Debian defaults to not having /usr/sbin or /sbin in PATH for non-root users; you can see this in /etc/profile, where it’s only adding /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin, and /sbin to root’s PATH, but not to other users.

          If you run su -l, then that’ll give you a login shell as root, and that’ll have those in the path.

          You can also add them to a regular user’s path. I don’t know what the “right way” to modify PATH for a graphical desktop is these days, so I can’t give much help there; with xdm starting Xorg, which is what I do, it’s to put it in a ~/.xession file, something like:

          export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games"

          and for login bash shells, like for if you ssh into the system or log in on the console, in ~/.bash_profile, the same.

          But GNOME under Wayland and all those new desktop environments probably have some way to modify PATH, something which they run at when you log in, and I don’t know the appropriate place to stick those or which you use.