How to add myself to sudoers when I have no root access on my debian machine?

Question

I've gotten myself into a weird situation. I just installed Debian on a virtual machine I made so that I can ease into it before I try dual booting. I went through all the set up, and as a test to see if I did it all right, I went to install wine (that should double check the Internet connection as well as make sure my sudo password is working. Unfortunately, I got the "wrong password try again" error. After some digging around on the internet I found out the following facts:

1. Debian user accounts don't come standard with root access (that's a good thing).
2. There is no such thing as a root user in Debian. There is a user group of "sudoers" instead.
3. You can't add anyone to the sudoer group without root access yourself.

Given that information, I found out that the one account I have does not have root access and therefore doesn't have the ability to give access (to itself or any other account). So, how on earth do I get an account with root access? I feel like I'm missing something really simple here, but I can't imagine what it is.

Answer 1

Looks like you missed something. From the Debian documentation:

6.3.2. Setting Up Users And Passwords

Just before configuring the clock, the installer will allow you to set up the “root” account and/or an account for the first user. Other user accounts can be created after the installation has been completed.

6.3.2.1. Set the Root Password

The root account is also called the super-user; it is a login that bypasses all security protection on your system. The root account should only be used to perform system administration, and only used for as short a time as possible.

Any password you create should contain at least 6 characters, and should contain both upper- and lower-case characters, as well as punctuation characters. Take extra care when setting your root password, since it is such a powerful account. Avoid dictionary words or use of any personal information which could be guessed.

If anyone ever tells you they need your root password, be extremely wary. You should normally never give your root password out, unless you are administering a machine with more than one system administrator.

If you do know the root password instead of using sudo you can use su -.

su - 

will become root once you enter the root password.