sudo user

Posted Aug 20, 2025 14:07 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
In reply to: sudo user by bluca
Parent article: Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie

You are correct. The installer has some text about it, on the page where it asks for the root password:

> Alternatively, you can lock the root account's password by leaving this setting empty, and instead use the system's initial user account (which will be set up in the next step) to gain administrative privileges. This will be enabled for you by adding that initial user to the 'sudo' group.

Admittedly it's quite a wall of text.

If you do leave the root password empty (and only then) is sudo installed automatically, with a config file that grants sudo access to users in the sudo group, in addition to putting the initial user in that sudo group.

sudo user

Posted Aug 20, 2025 14:11 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, appears there is text for it and I missed it. Thanks!

sudo user

Posted Aug 20, 2025 14:17 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] (1 responses)

I failed to notice that text as well for a long time, until a comment I saw somewhere made me look better the next time I installed Debian (I tend to install Debian quite regularly in VMs for testing stuff in isolation).

sudo user

Posted Aug 21, 2025 11:40 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link]

Yeah, I think I missed that for ages too, as it came after 2 or 3 previous walls of text which effectively say "make sure you set a strong password for root". At that point, I was mostly thinking "yes, I know, and I get it, set a strong password for root! Can we get to the input box where I type that in now, please?", and missed that the last one says "actually, you can just use an empty password and we'll do something different! (lol)"

sudo user

Posted Aug 20, 2025 14:14 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Thanks all for the corrections - I have amended the article.