Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Isaac Asimov, The Winds of Change and Other Stories”, >1983
Lately, I have been coming back to appreciate the Debian distribution. I have not stopped being a fan of Ubuntu, which I use for everything from my laptop to my work servers. The initial motivation was rather random: I was looking for a distribution that would be suitable for my HP Proliant ML110 G5. The problem with the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS desktop was due to the integrated graphics card on the motherboard, a Matrox Graphics MGA G200 AGP. Apparently, it just didn’t want to work properly with the 14.04 desktop. Gnome’s performance was devastating.
Installed Debian 8 and the problem did not manifest itself, very good performance, but I was used to using the sudo command and by default Debian did not have it, neither installed nor activated for the main user created during installation. Getting the necessary permissions each time by becoming root was rather annoying. So below are instructions for activating sudo
First, we become root
su root
then install sudo
apt-get install sudo
now edit the /etc/sudoers fils with the visudo command by adding
<username> ALL=(ALL) ALL
in my case
mcaliman ALL=(ALL) ALL
after the line #includedir /etc/sudoers.d. You can now use sudo as usual on ubuntu.