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Forgot your sudo password ? Here is a working fix, quick and painless.
(www.youtube.com)
TL;DR: watch the 2 minutes video for the fix.
Story time !
It's been a hot minute (~1year) since I needed/wanted to tinker with my Steam Deck. It's currently living its best life paired with the official dock as a desktop PC for my kid (e.g. YouTube and Roblox dedicated machine). So yeah, I went and forgot the sudo password I set back then, and I unhelpfully did not save it in Keepass or anything.
Today I put in the work to reset it... Here goes my journey.
- Try out every password variants of mine I can think of for 20 minutes. FAIL.
- Google it, stumble on some real stupid "solutions" promoted to the top of the results. FFS Google.
- Lots of YT videos seem to agree that recovery media is the way to go. Seems overkill. Cannot we get a root shell at startup or something ?
- Find an alternative method that looks suuuper risky (tinkers with the recovery partition) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYBpEysFMDM]. Nope not going to try that one.
- Go back to /r/SteamDeck (been a while) again the consensus is to use recovery media. Ok ok, recovery media it is !
- Follow instructions at https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3 and make a bootable USB drive. Easy Peasy.
- Muck about for a while with the dock's USB ports because the drive is too large or the ports are too close together. FFS Valve.
- Boot successfully on the recovery media, and start the 3 commands-long procedure.
sudo ~/tools/repair_device.sh chroot
rm -f /var/lib/overlays/etc/upper/passwd
rm -f /var/lib/overlays/etc/upper/shadow
- First command fails, which is a shame since the others cannot work if this one does not. Fuck.
- Back to googling and redditing (beggars can't be choosers). Find someone with a very similar error in a quite recent post. No answers though, except one by the OP himself who says he found a way AND DOCUMENTED IT. Thank you /u/TheArtfulAardvark for proper Internet etiquette. Obligatory XKCD curse avoided.
- Watch the 2 minutes-long video with cautious optimism. Does not seem too hard nor risky... To good to be true
- Perform the procedure, goes more or less exactly as described in the video (not exactly the same version of the boot menu, but same items).
- Fail to return to gaming mode with CTRL-ALT-F1 for some reason, so trigger a command line
reboot. - Check that the parameter added to GRUB was not saved (it was not).
- Return to desktop mode and finally set a new password with
passwd. Exhales. Thanks for the video and instructions 10 Minute Steam Deck Gamer.
Tl;dw:
Append systemd.debug_shell to the boot command line.
Complete written instructions are in fact in the video description, too. Here they are, for first timers ๐
Okay, you got me there. In all fairness, as instruction videos go, that one is on the tame side.
Thanks for posting the instructions here.