I just downloaded and installed Fink to see what that’s all about (& especially to check out the world of X Window apps) and after installing opened a new Terminal window and tried to run sudo dselect and I get this:
[localhost:~] ahunter% sudo dselect
sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0775, should be 0440
[localhost:~] ahunter%
I think maybe it’s a screwed-up permissions thing or something. I run this Apple utility for restoring default permissions and reboot. I do an ls of my home directory and try to sudo cp a randomly chosen file sitting in my home directory and again I get:
[localhost:~] ahunter% sudo cp dead.letter deadletter.old
sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0775, should be 0440
If you think it’s worth the risk (and there’s not much unless you’re a dimwit ), try
sudo su
This will make you root, and you should have no problem with dselect.
Personally, I have better luck and think it’s easier to skip dselect completely, and use apt-get.
apt-get update — should update the package list.
apt-get list — should show the “stable” packages
apt-get install package — should install the BINARY version of a package complete with dependencies.
I guess the reason why installing Fink could screw up sudo is that it added something to your sudoers file and messed up the permissions. Now to fix it - if sudo refuses to run, I doubt you can run sudo su -, I don’t know what OS you’re running since both Mac and dselect was mentioned, but normally I’d see if you can’t run /sbin/login and login as root. If you aren’t able to do that, you could perhaps boot in single mode (if your os uses lilo to load the kernel you could specify single after the selected kernel), but if this is OS X or something else I know nothing about I could just be talking nonsence
Oops. now that I re-read that, it looks like I overlook something.
First, do you have root activated in NetInfo Manager? If so, you should be able to change the permissions like this. In the terminal, do
su root --or maybe just su – but NOT sudo su since sudo’s not working. You should be able to su without being a sudoer as long as the root account is enabled.
Once you’re root, you can change the /etc/sudoers access mode hence:
chown 0440 /etc/sudoers
That gives the access that sudo seems to be wanting. Then try
exit
to stop being superuser, and try sudo su again. If it works, then it works!
You shouldn’t see anything compiling! fink should work pefectly with the precompiled binaries, and download every dependency for you.
I haven’t tried Fink Commander, but here’s a one-step method to get a working X-System running under OS X, assuming your permissions are okay. In the terminal, do
apt-get install xfree86-rootless
apt-get will download and install the pre-compiled binaries as well as all of the dependencies, and you’ll see an icon to start it somewhere in your Applications directory.
apt-get is part of fink (actually it’s a port of the Debian package manager), and you don’t need dselect nor the actual fink commands. Whereas fink automatically sudo’s you if needed, I don’t think apt-get does, so make sure you’re already su’d. You shouldn’t have to log in as root, but I’ve had to for some badly written installers.
I seem to have succeeded! In my previous post I reported that Fink Commander appeared to be stuck on selfupdate-cvs which was called within the process of trying to run reinstall of Xfree86-rootless, which followed on the heels of reinstalling Xfree86-base (apparently successfully). Eventually I brought up the window for “Interact with Fink” although it had not come to the fore, and entered a “default” response and damned if it didn’t respond with a spew of rapidly scrolling lines. Go figure. Ran for another hour and a bit, apparently revamping the underbelly of Fink, then went back to reinstalling Xfree-rootless, and…now I’ve got an X-windows environment!
::does happy dance::
Anyone got a nice GUI applications launcher to recommend for running in TWM?
), try
I’m going to try it again when I have time, logging in as root (not su and not sudo, but literally logged in as root).