rojimboo: Dude, I'm doing you the courtesy of trying to be patient and helping you, taking valuable chunks out of my free time that could be spent on gaming or clearly something else far more productive. For some random semi-professional project I assume, from a fellow video gamer, who is apparently a very good and experienced programmer yet has difficulty in all manner of syntax and commands and documentation. And is frankly an utter bother to work with in a 'support' situation. Because that's what this basically feels like. Tech support, given freely.
I really don't appreciate the tone or being told in all caps to read through your extremely long and verbose and rambling posts, and now I can understand why so few people persist in helping you.
The all caps wasn't intended to be rude in this context, but only intended to emphasize importance, and I didn't know a better way of doing that. I could have used bold but would that have been better or worse? I actually do appreciate very much that you're helping me, and I'm sorry if that has been misconstrued in any way. It's just that it seemed like you still didn't understand the methods that I was attempting or why I was attempting them that way, even though I had explained them. I'm not complaining about that, because sometimes people just misunderstand things - alright, fine - I can accept that. But the reason why I write such long posts is because without enough detail it would be even
easier to misunderstand or misinterpret things. So I thought it was important to write one long post that just summarized the whole issue, and draw your attention to it so that in the long run, it would save us both a lot of time and frustration, because we wouldn't keep misunderstanding each other. Alright? Again, sorry if it came across as rude, but I didn't know how else to do it. And thanks again for all your help, but as you can see, I'm still having problems, and it is rather frustrating.
rojimboo: Well then say so, because you keep talking about using different commands and doing different things, and you never said you had followed my instructions step by step exactly, from scratch, chrooted in Cubic.
For example, did you use useradd or adduser? Did you read the relevant parts of Arch wiki and if so, why the difference in the commands and sudoers line entries? What exactly did you do to change the root password chrooted in Cubic? What makes you think it did not work? How did you verify it? What was the output of sudo -ll and how do you know it was correct for your non-root user? Have you checked there is a user mint chrooted in cubic and if so, what groups they belong to and if they are in fact a root or possibly and admin user? Either chrooted in cubic, or booted into live iso? If that doesn't help, try exploring why or how Mint adds a mint root user without a password during the bootup process, and how lightdm picks it up. And what the sudoers file looks like under mint root in the iso bootup. etc I could add some more suggestions here, but I think the rest is up to you. And it seems like finally you are seeking out help in more appropriate avenues, so good luck with that, hope it works out this time.
I've been using adduser rather than useradd, because I think it's supposedly more compatible with Debian distributions.
I read the Arch wiki page about sudo and sudoers and that stuff, but lately I've been trying to force the root account to use the manual login rather than doing it automatically, which I think makes sudoers a moot point, at least for that particular method (and for some reason, when I'm in Cubic the default user is named "root" but then once I make the ISO and boot it, the name seems to have changed to "mint" - are these the same user or two different ones?).
I changed the password by doing moduser -p abc root, and I dont' know whether the password change necessarily worked or not, but I know that it's not requiring me to type the password when I log in, which is what I need it to do.
I didn't get the output of sudo -ll (sorry, but I could get it if I'm logged in as the root, though when I try the other method as a secondary user I can't get it because I can't access the disk to save a file, and the Internet is also disabled in the ISO, so I have no way of saving the text to get it to you - so I hadn't even thought of getting it while I'm the root user, but thanks for the tip).
There does not seem to be any user names mint while in Cubic - only a user named root, and then only mint in the booted ISO. It's almost as though it automatically changes the name or replaces the account. I'm not sure how a root user is different than an admin user, but in any case, when I log in as root/mint/whatever I seem to have unrestricted access, so I suppose it is in fact a root/sudo user.
I haven't the slightest idea how Mint would add a mint user or whether/how it would get into lightdm, or why it would alter or replace the root user with mint, but I didn't say mint doesn't have a password necessarily - I just said it automatically logs in without requiring me to
type a password.
I didn't check the sudoers file but that's a good idea. I'll check that and the lightdm files and anything else that seems relevant that I can think of.
rojimboo: Not really. I understand there are many issues still, but it wasn't very clear what you had or hadn't attempted, and troubleshooted. You only clarified that somewhat in your last post, whilst screaming READ CAREFULLY THIS TIME!!!. The main dilemma in this whole endeavour is your inability to be clear and concise, leading to confusion, imho.
You asked me the step by step instructions of what I do in a fresh setup for users and sudo access - I told you what worked, twice. And you started shouting.
*shrugs*
And I'm starting to dislike the tone, so I'm just gonna go do something more fun. Like pick my nose. Or play Phoenix Point from a separate xserver and tty inside a different window manager i3 on Arch to get Nvidia Gsync working, with a custom wine, kernel, DXVK and script I worked on and got working flawlessly, after some perserverance. That's the beauty of linux - working with it, learning it, controlling it, and finally seeing the results with functional software and likely games. We are afterall on GOG.
Again, I'm sorry if my tone came across as rude, but it wasn't meant to. I only meant it to signify importance. And I was trying to be as clear and concise as possible, and I even listed specific commands that I did. In fact, here's the newest thing that I tried, from the Cubic website:
I just did it again, and it sort of half fixed the problem, but not really. This time the login screen displayed (so autologin must have been disabled) but the password didn't work, and instead it wanted a user name. If I entered any random thing then it wanted a password after that, but if I typed "mint" as the user name then it logged in automatically without a password! So that's still no good. Cinnamon still crashed and reverted to Mate, but this time there were no icons on the desktop and when I right-clicked on it nothing happened. Here's how I configured it:
usermod -p abc root
mkdir /home/mint
mkdir /home/mint/.config
Then I copied the dconf directory that I had backed up into this .config directory.
rm /usr/share/initramfs-tools//scripts/casper-bottom/15autologin
rm /usr/share/initramfs-tools//scripts/casper-bottom/25adduser
I created the /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file as shown here:
[SeatDefaults]
allow-guest=false
autologin-guest=false
autologin-user=
autologin-user-timeout=0
greeter-show-manual-login=true
Then I modified the /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/70-linuxming.conf file and put the same text into it, except that it already had a line after the [SeatDefaults] which said:
user-session=cinnamon
So I just left that there and pasted everything else after it.
I tried service lightdm restart and I think that's when it gave me a list of files that it was updating relative to lightdm, including /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf, even though it was a new one that I added, so I took that as a good sign. It did say something about changing [SeatDefaults] to [Seat:*], but I didn't know if I should go back into the two files that I changed before and alter them again, so I didn't, but I can try it the next time if it's a good idea.
update-init-ramfs -u
By the way, there also seems to be a live-update-initramfs, but I don't know whether that would work better or not, so I didn't use it.
I didn't do this line:
apt install --reinstall linux-headers-5.4.0-26 linux-headers-5.4.0-26-generic linux-image-5.4.0-26-generic
Because above you said I only need that if it's broken or missing.
So then I went to the next step and used the regular kernel (the only one listed, actually), and booted, and that's when I got the results I described at the beginning of this post.
Did I still somehow do something wrong?
