Today I started to log in to my root account via the command prompt to make a backup of my software. I was promptly greeted by this:


jonquil@sabayon ~ $ su
Password:
Permission denied.


The answer to why it was doing this was not very obvious. I hadn't done anything with my system that may have caused this to happen, so I didn't really have anything to go on.

Fortunately over at the Sabayon forums someone guessed I had been deleted from the group "wheel" (the administrative group in Sabayon). So the solution to this was pretty simple: I just needed to log in as root and add myself as a user back to the group "wheel":

gpasswd -a yourUserName wheel

Hopefully this will help someone out there that may come across the same problem in Sabayon. The administrative group is most definitely not covered by a very obvious name!