password not accepted for apps which require su authority

[Russell Gadd]

(please bear with me as I am a new user of Linux)
I installed Ubuntu Breezy using the "expert" mode (will let you know why if you ask) so I was asked to set up a root account and a user account - which I did. When I tried to update the system with the GUI update manager it asked for a password but didn't accept either the user password or the root password (neither did it tell me which one it was expecting!)

When I used a terminal within Gnome to log in as root using su it logged me in ok proving that my root account was working ok. After some internet surfing I suspected the sudoers file which only had
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
(apart from the # lines which I assume are all just comments).

I figured that the user account I set up ought to be in here also so I added it (with visudo) and that solved the problem - I can now use my user password when update manager asks for it. (There was another GUI app which also had the same problem, I forget which, so I figure it applies to all GUI apps which need root privileges).

The bug seems to be that the first user needs to be in the sudoers file even if a root account is set up, but the "expert" installation doesn't do that.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. That's probably a duplicate of bug #40684 or bug #16139. Reassign to Colin who will know about that an can mark it as duplicate if required

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Right, thanks; this looks like bug 40684 to me.