Fedora 14 problem with using root

Question

I reinstalled my Linux and set the root password. But now I can't login to root. I can only run updates by password setted and do similar task but sudo is not working.

What's the problem?

Answer 1

Fedora does not configure sudo by default. Instead the default behavior is to obtain a root shell with the su command. The rough equivalent to sudo is to use the -c argument to make it run a command. For instance, to update your system you'd run:

su -c 'yum update'

As Matt Jenkins indicated, you can configure sudo to work on Fedora. Follow his instructions for discovering the syntax of the sudoers file and then run this command to edit it:

su -c visudo

To add yourself to the admin group more easily, without modifying /etc/groups directly, just run this command:

su -c 'usermod -aG admin [username]'

Answer 2

This is caused by one of two things:

1. You are not in the correct group to use sudo
2. You have not got the sudo configuration file set up right.

type:

$ man sudoers

and read all about setting up the sudoers file.

Editing of the sudoers file is done through visudo.

I have in my sudoers file:

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

and I am a member of the admin group (in /etc/group). This lets me sudo to root without having to enter a password.