sudo/su command causes Adrianee to hang

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

I have Adriane Knoppix 7.2.0 installed to the harddrive of a netbook(an ASUS 1015e-DS03) and I have a problem: Dropping down to the shell, whenever I try using sudo to run a command as root or su to get a root shell, the computer hangs. I can still use caps lock plus arrow keys to have Blinux read on screen text and pressing the arrow keys by themselves will work similiar to if I ran a command that takes time and produces no output, but even when I feed sudo a command that should output something immediately, it produces nothing. Normally, a problem like this would prompt me to re-install Adriane, but between having to back-up/restore 150+ GB of files to do so and not having ready access to an external optical drive that is reliable for booting, I would rather find a fix that doesn't require a re-install. Also, for what it is worth, Adriane has never given me this specific problem on my Desktop and I have done even more experimentation with customized hard drive install of Adriane on that machine.

[Werner P. Schulz]

Did you check md5sum of the Adriane-Knoppix-CD download and are there any errors while booting the CD with the cheatcode "knoppix testcd"? If already the install medium is damaged, it's impossible to find the errors in your HD installation.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

I must confess, that in-spite being a somewhat seasoned user of Linux(started using Ubuntu around 5.10, switched to Debian at some point in 2011, and switched to Adriane last December due to failing vision), I have no idea how to compare checksums. I also do not have access to someone who can both see well enough to navigate the install disk's boot menu and knows enough about linux to use the cheat codes. I am, however, assuming the installation media is good considering that the Netbook had been running stable for a few weeks before this problem manifested and my desktop has been running stable even longer installed from the same disk and with a greater number of packages removed from the default set-up. Not sure how to list the customization made post-install, especially since I went from 1300+ packages installed with a clean install to ~670 packages installed without any problems. The last changes to installed software before the problem started include removing flashpluginnonfree and its orphaned dependencies, some non-free firmware for Wireless cards(not needed as I always use Ethernet on the Netbook).

[Werner P. Schulz]

I have send you an email with two pictures appended; perhaps somebody can help you now to check the integrity of the installation CD. In the picture testcd.png the helper can see where to type the sequence "adriane testcd" and after this hit [Enter]. In the picture message.png the helper can see how the message looks like after the line "Checking KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX...".

But I suppose, you have broken your installtion by this action:

.. especially since I went from 1300+ packages installed with a clean install to ~670 packages installed without any problems.

It is never a good idea to purge applications within a well running system.