Saturday, September 6, 2008

Ubuntu: Synaptic not in menu and cannot start/run from command line

My otherwise blissful installation and use of Ubuntu on an aging 2.4ghz athlon was rudely interrupted today when I could not find Synaptic package manager in my menus, and when, when I tried to run it from the command line, I was informed that there was a su problem and I should contact my administrator. Oy. I am the administrator...

Turns out that the problem was that I somehow removed myself from the admin group, therefore, I lost privileges to do sudo type things (such as fixing the fact that I lost sudo priviliges).

To correct this, I had to reboot and go to the recovery console and choose the root shell option. From there, I used the following command to restore the admin group to my user account.

# usermod --group admin rcs

I then rebooted and everything was good again. So Ubuntu is back in my good graces.

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