On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 7:11 AM, Kaj Persson <kape_...@algonet.se> wrote: > Hi Jimmy, > Well, I did not follow your suggestion exactly, but as people has said, the > root account is already and always there, even it has not been assigned a > password. So, against my real whish, not to activate the root account, I > gave the command sudo passwd root, and entered a password. And now I suppose > I have burned my ships and have no way back...
Of course you have a way back. man vipw man 5 passwd man 5 shadow and note the -s option. man nologin man false Then sudo vipw and change the line for root (should be the very first line) to give it either /bin/false or /sbin/nologin as the default shell for root. (That's the last field.) cat /etc/passwd after you're done, to make sure you saved it. Then, sudo vipw -s and replace the encrypted password (second ffield) there with '*'. > But! Nothing has changed. I can still not enter program icons to the panel, > and not define keyboard shortcuts. If I sort the icons on the desktop they > still, after a cold start, come back in a completely other order, dispite I > had marked "Keep ajusted" (right click on desktop). > > So...? > /Kaj Have you checked group ownership and permissions? Also, have you checked your mount parameters? And have you checked whether you have established SELinux or acl permissions or anything of that ilk? (BTW, do you keep a backup of your /home partition? I usually find myself using cp -p or tar to copy the files from the old /home to the new one, instead of keeping an old /home around.) -- Joel Rees One of these days I'll get someone to pay me to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C. Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef, run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define, and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast. http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html More of my delusions: http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html