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My account became administrator by default, but then I changed it to standard. From that instant, I'm asked for the root password to upgrade software, for authentication and also to edit user settings.

How can I resolve this?

Fabby
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Deepak Ramanan
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  • @A.B. In this situation, the user no longer has administrative powers (is no longer in the sudo group), so it really is asking for root's password rather than the user's password. Of course, root isn't set up to be able to authenticate with a password by default, and the proper solution to this problem is not to enable the root account but instead to re-add the user account to the sudo group so they regain the ability to authenticate with their own password to perform administrative tasks. – Eliah Kagan Apr 30 '15 at 16:45

1 Answers1

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You can set it from the Recovery Menu when you boot your system up. Here is some good step by step instructions on getting your system into Recovery Mode so that you can fix the user settings. The biggest part is to get the root partition mounted in Read / Write so you can make changes to the user account.

http://www.sysads.co.uk/2014/05/reset-lost-root-password-ubuntu-14-04/

After you have the system booted to Recovery Mode doing the root that they show, type in the following to add your user back to sudo

usermod -a -G sudo username

where you will replace username with your own username.

Reboot your system, and you should have sudo capabilities back on your account.

Terrance
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  • I am going to leave this answer here, even though the question has been tagged as a duplicate. I have read through the answer link, and from my understanding the adduser command is intended for adding a new user to the system, where usermod is intended for modifying an existing user and being able to add them to an existing group. – Terrance Apr 30 '15 at 17:59