My sudo seems to be broken. What should I do?

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1

My sudo seems to be broken after configuring and installing CoprHD which supports only OpenSUSE officially. When I use sudo it keeps telling me that the password is wrong, while I am sure that what I am typing is correct as I could successfully log in and check the password via passwd.

It is no use to boot to the recovery mode of installation ISO and reset both the password of root and my account.

What’s the solution to this?

2

Have you tried the obvious, like:

  • type the password characters in a terminal and see if they are as intended (maybe a different keyboard layout has taken over without you noticing?)
  • check for dirt / molding debris on the keyboard or keys intermittently failing?
  • try:

su -

this starts a superuser login shell that should be unaffected by changes to other user’s environment.

3

And remember Linux is case sensitive

4

And for completeness (and just in case you don’t know) the password you give to sudo is your user’s password and not root’s/superuser’s.

5

don’t you mean the other way around, you give root’s password to get root permissions, this is not a deb fork
if you want to change the way sudo works go in yast and edit sudoers options or edit /etc/sudoers

6

That is not how it is in openSUSE right after installation. openSUSE configured sudo to work the same way as su. That is fine imho (but one could ask why use sudo and not su instead).

7

Actually, I don’t use sudo at all (unless I use one of my deb based VM’s on VirtualBox). I normally use su - when I need root priv’s. I didn’t know openSUSE had sudo setup different to the deb distros. Ya learn something everyday.