How to rejoin “Wheel” group to get back Sudo privileges?

General Discussion
1

Greetings to all!

Please be so kind as to guide me to resolve this situation,where I got into as a novice.

System Information:

Intel NUC9i7QNX,

Drives Both 1TB as below:

Samsung NVME 1: Windows 10 / Clear Linux (Shared)

Samsung NVME 2: FreeBSD 13

rEFind Boot Manager

Clear Linux was installed in June 2021 and the system was functioning well till the update # 35800.

After the 35800 update, the audio stopped working.This problem continued and I have 35860 now.

During same time,the audio setup continued to work under Widows 10 and FreeBSD.

Somehow, I figured out that it was a permission related issue and added myself to the audio group and the audio became functional again.

I had used this command as sudo:

usermod -G audio nameofuser

I am the only user, sudo, su everything with this CL installation.

Unwittingly, I had got myself out of the “Wheel” group.
Result : I get rebuffs from the Terminal as follows:
1.Clearlinux user is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported. 2.usermod: PAM: Permission denied
3.su: Authentication failure

The system is fine now except that the *groups* command shows that I am member of the *audio* group only.
How do I get back to Wheels group and get sudo privileges again?
Thank you,
Rams
2

Does https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/maintenance/enable-user-space.html#id2 help?

3

Thank you pixelgeek for your response.
While attempting to follow the method as indicated in the linked pages,

I got the following :
1.user is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
2.useradd: PAM: Permission denied.

(user=my user name in #1 above)

Had searched the guides, forum posts in this forum for using a live desktop image to carry out a repair similar to:

https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/maintenance/fix-broken-install.html
No luck so far.

Rams

4

Some clues here :

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5
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6

So the issue is you want to execute usermod -aG wheel username, but to do that you need to be in the wheel group or have the root account available.

To break that circle, you can go to rescue target (a.k.a. single user mode) and add the groups there as root. While you’re at it you will probably want to add the other default groups as well.
groups=1000(username),4(adm),10(wheel),11(cdrom),18(dialout),39(video),63(audio)

How to get into single user mode

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7

Check out sudo.ws

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8
9

Thank you,reinvented the wheel and added my username to wheel group!!
Thank you to the members of this forum, who took time to give me several useful information in this thread.
I was successful to add my username back into the wheel group, a few days back. Could not post it in this thread immediately. Sorry for that.

Tried different methods and the one that helped me was as follows:

  1. Booted the USB Clear Linux OS live.
  2. Mounted the root partition.
    (My root device was /dev/mapper/luks-b9825c29-931c-4ca2-b410- 342a8895ef07)
  3. sudo chroot /mnt
  4. Added my username: usermod -G wheel -a
  5. exit
  6. Cd /
  7. Sudo umount /mnt

Exited the terminal, rebooted, removed the USB.

Checked with the groups command on my installed system, and that confirmed my Wheel group inclusion.
Many thanks once again.

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