Thank you all for thoughts and viewpoints on what can be wrong in my
installation of Debian 9. I have looked through places I might expect
can contain some explanation, but so far I have not been able to exclaim
an "Ah, that's it!". Here are some of my observations:
* First source of install: Well, I do know I wrote that used the live
image, but to be honest, for now I am not sure, I do not remember. I had
downloaded the live image as well as the install image, and most
probable choice would be the later. But I do not know. Anyway the
install process itself went without any problems.
* At the install I made it fully new from the bottom. The only directory
I kept unchanged was my home directory. This is situated on an own
partition. All the others were reformatted: /, /boot, /usr, /var and
/tmp. All these are on individual partitions while e.g. /etc is
contained in the root partition. At earlier installations I have noticed
that the home directory can contain wrong configuration files, so as a
test I moved all hidden files i.e. files starting with a dot to a new
created directory "hidden". This was however after the install. So at a
subsequent cold start the system had no configuration files there but
created new ones with default values. This however had no positive
impact on my problem.
* Configuring sudo? No I have not done that explicitly, not more than
what the install program did itself. I have looked at /etc/sudoers and
what I think the important lines are:
# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
#includedir /etc/sudoers.d
In /etc/sudoers.d there are no more files than README.
There is no /etc/sudo.conf file.
* Regarding access to my user directory: During my search I did in fact
find some files and directories owned by user root or group root. These
are changed to be owned by my user id and group id, but this did not
help. By the way, On this computer I have always had just one user,
mine, and hence got the user id 1000 and group id 1000. This is the case
now too.
uid 1000 is a member of the sudo group.
* As I wrote I have always used this method of not setting any password
to the root account, and this is for quite many years now. My Linux path
has gone via Ubuntu, well to be honest a couple of years after the
Microsoft era I ran in Suse, but was not fully satisfied. And when
Ubuntu and Canonical introduced Unity, I left that ship for Linux Mint
Debian edition (LMDE) until I took the last(?) step into Debian a couple
of years ago where the entrance point was jessie. The empty root
password has always worked fine until now. Possibly Ubuntu has patched
the sudologin but should LMDE? And jessie? I do not think so.
Hope someone can find something significant in this and give a hint on
what to do.
Kaj
