So… I made a sloppy mistake and locked myself out of sudo on my Vero 4k+. (For the record, I used visudo to comment out the ‘nopasswd’ entry without first adding my user to the ‘sudo’ group, so instead of sudo access requiring my password, I now have no sudo access, and root login is still disabled as per the default.) I’m hoping I can fix this without resorting to anything as drastic as a factory reset or full reinstall.
On a typical Debian amd64 install on a PC, I would have an obvious path to a root shell from the GRUB menu, and from there I could reverse the change easily. Obviously the boot process is a bit different on an embedded device, so:
- Is there a built-in way to get into a root recovery shell from which I can edit a file on the root filesystem? If so, how do I get into it? Tap on some key during boot?
- If not, would I be able to boot an arm64 Debian installation USB stick via the toothpick trick and use the Debian recovery mode from there? I expect I can figure out which emmc partition holds the root fs and mount it manually if need be.