Problems with root access!
I'm getting a very strange problem when I build and boot an ISO, and I've tried EVERYTHING to get it to work correctly! I'm very desperate now, so PLEASE help me! I'm using Mint 20 Cinnamon 64-bit and trying to make a custom ISO which will run in live mode but WITH a secure login password. But I also need to modify a few things in the home directory (or subdirectories of it) and that's also causing a bit of a glitch.
I've tried basically two approaches:
- Giving a password to the default "root" user
- Making a separate user with a password to log in
When I try the method for the root user, no matter what password I assign (using usermod -p [password] root), for some reason it never requires me to give it when logging in. I also checked this page and followed its instructions for disabling auto-login:
https:/
Or I tried to follow them but I didn't seem to have the same files or the same text in them, so I couldn't do anything about it (as it turns out I need to edit the /etc/lightdm/
The other problem is that for some reason there's no home folder by default (why?), but if I make one and put a mint folder inside (for some reason, the root gets a folder called "mint" rather than "root") then I can put a .config folder in there and copy in the dconf folder that I had backed up from a different Linux installation (it has all of the user interface preferences the way they need to be, and some are crucially important!).
But it seems like when I put the dconf folder there then any ISO I make and boot from that result ends up causing a glitch so that Cinnamon crashes during startup and can't be reloaded, so it reverts to Mate (which isn't the end of the world, though I'd prefer Cinnamon, but I could use the Mate ISO instead if that would prevent the crash error - but why would it happen in the first place?).
In any case, it doesn't require a password login either, so the other method I've tried, which as I mentioned earlier, is to create an extra user (somehow it defaults to making me login with that user, which is good, but I'm just curious - why does it do that?). When I do it that way I do it like this:
adduser xyz # and then I set a password, and I also make the root account password the same, just in case
usermod -G root xyz
usermod -g 0 xyz
So it's in the root group, and then I put my dconf in the appropriate folder within the /home/xyz folder (which is automatically created when I create the user).
I also use visudo to add an extra line so that it looks like:
# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
xyz ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
The root line was already there so I made the xyz line to match. I've seen it say (ALL) rather than (ALL:ALL) in some examples, but mine says (ALL:ALL) by default (and so does my installed Mint on my HD, and that works, so it must be right), but I'm not sure why there's a descrepency; does anyone know?
Anyway, when I boot that it does require me to log in and doesn't cause Cinnamon to crash, which is all good, BUT then when I try to do anything that requires root/sudo access (which for some reason even includes things like mounting and ejecting drives - why?), typing the password doesn't work! I also try it without typing a password (I just leave it blank) and that doesn't work either!
I know for a fact that it's possible to make a live mode work with a password at the login and have it still allow root/sudo access, because I've done exactly that when using Linux Live Kit (sorry for mentioning a competitor, but the reason why I stopped using that is because it's not even compatible with UEFI - thankfully Cubic is, if only I could get it to do what I really NEED it to do!).
I've also tried doing the same thing except with the addition of setting the xyz user ID to 0 so that it matches the root, but when I did that it just logged in automatically as the root, without me typing a password (it didn't crash Cinnamon because I had put the dconf in the xyz/.config directory instead of mint/.config, since I thought that one would be loading, which pretty much verifies that the dconf is causing the problem only when being used for the root/mint user).
So without being able to mount drives it doesn't even have access to the hard drive, and it also can't use many administrative programs that require root access! I'm sure you can see how that could be a problem. Could someone please tell me how I'm going about this the wrong way?
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