How to restore sudoers access, or reset root password?

Ask Fedora
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1

I have lost access in sudoers file and forgotten root pwd. How to recover?

I’m on Fedora 36 and have downloaded Fedora 38. However, install/upgrade fails to proceed when it asks for an Administrator password. sudo in Terminal window also tells me my userid is not in the sudoers file. Without a known root password, how can I proceed?

Note: The last thing of interest I did was to begin planning for hercules emulator several weeks ago. Userid hercules was created and also hercgrp group & that’s as far as I got. Since hercules on linux requires building from scratch, I have some work to do of the sort I’ve never done before and I’ve yet to dive into that. Of course, I won’t be doing much of anything until I can restore sudo and/or root access.

Peter

2

You can follow How to Reset the root Password :: Fedora Docs to reset your root’s password.

3

You can also use the groups command to see what groups your user belongs to. The admin user should belong to the wheel group to get sudo access by default.

4

Thank you for the tips. Fedora Doc for root pwd reset worked seamlessly, as did the gpasswd cmd for rejoining the wheel group.

Peter