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I have been using Precise Pangolin and I am into a problem now :( I was trying to add my current user to the group vboxusers.. So I used the command,
sudo usermod -G vboxusers myusername
And it got succeded too. But after adding like that, I am unable to perform any sudo operations. Whenever i use a sudo command I get an error message stating "myusername is not in sudoers file".
I tried enabling root account also. But I couldn't. How to fix this issue?
Unfortunately that command do the wrong thing, because gives you only that group and removes all others. usermod should be avoided, there are better and simpler tools to use.
The solution is to start in recovery mode and add your user to the sudo group.
To add a user to a group, I usually use
sudo gpasswd -a $user $group
many others prefer to use
sudo adduser $user $group
Both these commands do not change the set of groups to which the user already belongs.
As enzotib comments, a good way is to restart in recovery mode and write
for i in adm cdrom sudo video plugdev lpadmin; do adduser myusername $i; done
Substituting myusername as required. This will add you to all the important groups, including sudo, which gives you access to sudo.
sudo usermod -a -G adm,cdrom,sudo,video,plugdev,lpadmin myusername.
Jul 29, 2012 at 21:04