I switched to the "advanced" mode on rebooting by using "grub" as the
username and that ##### password, and it presented me with another Trisquel
bootup, where I just added my usual "george" password at login ... outwardly
nothing different.
Running in standard mode, this is what I had seen:
george@amenex:/etc/sudoers.d$ sudo adduser george sudo
The user `george' is already a member of `sudo'.
george@amenex:/etc/sudoers.d$ sudo adduser root admin
adduser: The group `admin' does not exist.
Running in "advanced" mode, this it what I then got (note the "~" that now
appears before $):
george@amenex:~$ sudo adduser george sudo
[sudo] password for george:
The user `george' is already a member of `sudo'.
george@amenex:~$ sudo adduser root admin
adduser: The group `admin' does not exist.
george@amenex:~$ adduser root admin
adduser: Only root may add a user or group to the system.
Looks like a "Catch-22" to me.
Bear in mind that the file /etc/sudoers has the following line:
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
But it does have another line that I need to look up:
Defaults mail-badpass
OK ... So I have to run as Administrator all the time. How is that an
improvement over *indows, where running the OS as Administrator is strongly
deprecated, and running as a User is relatively more secure ? In Trisquel,
anyone who breaks my password gets access to sudo by default, so long as he
knows enough to prepend "sudo" to any command ? Any time that the Trisquel OS
asks me for a root password, that seems to be an unintended bug in the
system; when things are working OK, Trisquel asks for "Authentication" where
I am to enter my ordinary login password because "sudo" is automatically
prepended to the "Authenticate" query. There is no root protection, it seems
to me.
That's not to say that I dislike Trisquel ... the Ubuntu USB-pendrive "live"
installation works the same way by default, and that scares me, too.
