I mistakenly ran:
sudo chmod 777 -R /*
on an Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS filesystem. I was trying to take ownership of 73 album folders I downloaded from The Internet Archive in one media folder but due to mistaken syntax I evidently took ownership of all system files to the main user account instead of root.
Now none of my appimages will launch because they aren't owned by root. They all return this error:
sudo: /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 and have the setuid bit set
I Googled solutions and found:
$ su -
Password:
# chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo
# chmod a=rx,u+ws /usr/bin/sudo
But both null and the main user passwords are rejected for root.
Then I Googled "su authentication failure" which is the error I get when I type "su -" and try null for the password.
I found this explanation:
su asks for the root password. Since Ubuntu doesn't set a root password by default, you can't use it to become root.
Instead, to become root, use sudo -i with your personal password.
I tried that and I get the same error that all the appimages are throwing:
sudo: /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 and have the setuid bit set
Most search results indicate that this is a case of major system corruption and a nuclear reinstallation of the OS is the only option.
I have a Timeshift disk snapshot of the OS from a few years ago I'm going to try to restore, but I'll have to wait until March 27 when I'll have the day free to attack the project.
Damn.
