hi all, I just got endeavouros today, first time using linux, and I had to use chown to gain access to my drives, but I 'did’n’t do this for my OS drive - yet. Later, I wanted to put theme folders into it, so I tried, and it was locked, just like my other folders had been. seeing as I fixed that by a simple chown command, i tried the same. it was only later I noticed I could no longer use sudo !! :’( is there a way I can fix this without a complete reinstall? I would be very thankful for some help
You will need to be careful about where chown is being used. For system files and so on, it’s best to leave those well alone. It would seem you’ve changed ownership of /etc?
Could you explain a little more please, about what drive access you were having difficulty with, and what you changed?
You’ve broken the installation. Reinstall and read/learn more about how to deal with a unix system. It’s not a single sentence I can tell you on how to (or not to) do things, it’s more a way of life (sorry). This is based on the assumption you changed all the files in /etc (which looks likely).
Not all things are a nail, and a hammer is not the way to deal with every issue Basically there’s a reason why everything is the way it is and changing it usually isn’t a good idea. Likely the approach (since you gave no details) was to edit the file, not take ownership of it ;0
You have ownership of your home directory and very likely that’s where you should have put these files.
If what you did was something like chown -R user:user /, then yeah a re-install is likely your simplest and surest option.
In normal circumstances, those customisations are in your home folder, under /home/[user]/. But I’m not sure if the way you’ve approached this is “normal circumstances”.
Assuming it’s all in your home folder, backup the contents of /home/[user]/. You can then restore that once you have your new install.
As Bink has said…I agree with everything he said
I will add, your system would be repairable, but you don’t know what you’ve done basically, and even if it were in my hands, I’d just reinstall it (would be very time-consuming).
As to your customization and apps, that’s a ‘big’ question..and again not knowing exact details, I can’t answer it for sure. But the easy (and not completely correct) answer is no.
@spencer, feel free to reach out first if you have access issues again, and we can help guide your options.
You’re far from being the first person to slip up on a first-time install. I’m sure many of us, myself included, have stories to tell of our own misadventures
Yes, everyone does stuff like this. Everyone once in a while does something stupid :0
I remember doing the classical rm -rf /, even though i did it rm -rf ../ from probably /etc or something…egg on face, it was a school server back in the college days
Ir’s the sometimes painful way we learn.
I’ll add another caution here. Basically every time you MIGHT use sudo, you need to question yourself (or someone else) on ‘is this a good idea?’
Most anything you do that never involved root authority privileges won’t really cause serious problems to the integrity of the installation. Oh absolutely if you remove your home directory you may consider that a disaster, but the machine will still boot ;0
And I know this is hard to believe, but other installation or upgrading software (paru,pacman), I probably only perform a handful (I can only think of one or two) of modification to the general system that require root authority. Truly the only thing I remember doing is configuring DNS (one file edit) and I do installs (real or virtual machine) a lot, and that’s an optional activity for almost everyone.
Basically there’s a reason why everything is the way it is and changing it usually isn’t a good idea. Likely the approach (since you gave no details) was to edit the file, not take ownership of it ;0
