I forgot you’re not supposed to edit the ‘/etc/sudoers’ file, which defines which users can assume administrative rights, by hand. As the first lines of the file will tell you, you should use ‘visudo’ to make changes. I guess I just don’t screw around with that file enough to remember that (or follow directions).
If you do try and edit the file, it will be read-only. You can use ‘sudo’ to change the permissions of the file to include write, but then ‘sudo’ will not work. And then you cannot use ‘sudo’ to change it back. Root can make the changes, but Ubuntu disables the root account by default (you just have to give it a password to enable it). I generally do not enable the root account as sudo works fine. If I do happen to be doing a lot of administration, I’ll just use ‘sudo’ to become root.
Alright, so nothing local will work. I boot up a trusty Knoppix CD and click the desktop icon for the hard drive’s root partition. Oh. I encrypted the file system. Damn. I did a little searching around to see if there was any easy to way to get Knoppix to decrypt the file system. It’s probably not that hard, but I didn’t find any easy answer that wouldn’t mean potentially screwing something up further. Not that I care about any of the data, but I have a very simple logic for situations like this:
if time_to_fix > time_to_reinstall then screw_it_reinstall
Which means more fun. I installed the Hardy alpha (now beta) and it worked great. Loved the little changes and appreciate the new features. But the install CD for Hardy has a bug where you can’t install with certain CD-ROM configurations. Lucky me, I have such a configuration. So, for the second time, I’m installing Gutsy just to upgrade to Hardy.
