I made a huge mistake, even for a noobie. Because of an issue I was having with symlink and a “read-only file system” response, I changed my group to include root, which after a little research I learned was a very bad thing to do. So I Google’d (whose “responses may include mistakes”) how to retract root access for user, i.e. – sudo usermod -rG user adm wheel sambashare user , except that doesn’t even remotely work. What can I do to restore my groups to the original setting, otherwise I will reinstall KDE Linux just to be safe.
Reinstall is the safest way.
But you can add your username group back:
usermod -G username username
But if you added and copied files etc., then they will now possibly belong to root and permissions might be messed up.
Thank you dusoft. Problem solved. One suggestion though: For noobies who don’t know any better (like me), they need to know that the command doesn’t actually do anything until you restart your computer.
Ah, well, you could also just log out and log back in. But yes, next time I will mention that, good point.
I tried logging out and then logging back in, but it didn’t work. So I thought maybe I already broke something in KDE Linux, but then I had the thought “this has to work” because so many other sources of info said it should work, so I thought about restarting my computer to see if it made a difference and it did. Don’t ask me why.
IIRC group permission changes on UNIX-like operating systems do in fact require a restart, not just a logout/login cycle.
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