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I am new to Ubuntu and I have a looot of issues :))! I saw that many things can be solved by typing commands in that window, terminal, which is kinda new to me( I am Windows 7 user, not a developer).

Moving to the point, whenever I try to type commands in the Terminal, it is prompting me to type the password. Firstly: which password, since I deactivated typing the password at logon. Maybe it's the same :-?... Secondly, I can't get to type it all, because it tells me: "Sorry, try again." And the 3 password attempts thing.

So, I googled it a little and I found that it's a TextExpander problem. What is that, and how can it be solved? I going crazy, since I can't enter a single command without that annoying password prompt.

Thanks a lot guys, and wait for me, I'm gonna ask a lot of questions, since I found this site is made especially for this! ;))

Mt Kta
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  • I am really not clear on what you are asking. Can you provide an example of a program which is asking often for a password? – Charles Green Aug 17 '14 at 22:25
  • I can't really figure it out either. As far as I can tell they're asking why a sudo-prefaced command would ask for a password, and then why doesn't the password show while you type it. Not sure what textexpander has to do with this though. – amanthethy Aug 17 '14 at 23:11
  • TextExpander? What operating system (and version) are you running? – Eliah Kagan Aug 18 '14 at 00:48

2 Answers2

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The explain

Password prompting in Linux is a security thing. Linux is built with far higher security than Windows. It usually prompts you with a password if you're making installations or changing system-wide settings. You will notice password prompting usually if a command is preceeded by sudo. That means "super user do", or do this in super-user privileges, aka in Windows, run as Administrator. The only difference, is that you usually don't need to provide your password in Windows.

The ease

If you run commands with sudo in the terminal, the password you provide typically expires 15 minutes after the last sudo execution. That means that if you will need to make many changes in the system you can keep executing as many sudo commands that you like and you will have to type the password just once, that is, until it expires.

For those that will make changes to the system for an extended period of time and would like to lock the terminal in super-user mode, these commands may be executed in the Terminal:

$ sudo su

or

$ sudo -i

Then notice how your terminal prompt will change. It will stay there until you type the command exit. Just as note, once you are in super-user prompt (eg root@comp:/home/user#) remove all the preceeding sudos from the commands you copied from the internet. (And as a side note, pasting in the Terminal is Ctrl+Shift+V)

PS
And yes, the password you type is your user password. Hopefully you didn't forget it. :)

The Eye
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It's the same password you desabled on login (the one you set on installation), you can bypass the password requirement by editing the /etc/sudoers file.

This file is extremely delicate, if you get it wrong the system won't be able to grand you administration privileges anymore. There exist however a program called visudo which can help you to edit it safety and make sure the syntax is fine.

sudo visudo

This command will open a cli editor. Go to the end of the file and type:

%your_user_name_here ALL=(root) NOPASSWD:ALL

Save, exit, and reload the session. This new setting will allow you to run those commands with sudo but without the need of typing the password everytime (see The eye answer), there may be security risks but it'll ease your administration tasks while you learn more about Linux.

Javier López
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