groupadd failure while writing changes to /etc/group

Question

I have been following this guide on installing debian-kit on my Sony Xperia Tablet Z and the installation goes fine until I try to apt-get install andromize which fails with the error groupadd: failure while writing changes to /etc/group. I also get the same message if I try to add a user with adduser.

I have partitioned my external SD card to 10gb FAT32 and 20GB ext2 and used the mk-debian -i /dev/block/vold/179:37 which is the correct partition.

If I look in /etc/ I can see that there are additional files called group- and passwd- as well as group and passwd but I have no idea if this is relevant.

I'm logged in as root and the partition is loaded readwrite because all other apt-get installs work, it just fails on any that modify the users / groups.

ls -l /etc/group returns the following...

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 476 Jul17 19:13 /etc/group

Solution 1

The solution in the end (inspired by @steeldriver) was to download this app from the play store because under Android KitKat you need to change the SELinux mode to permissive.

A combination of that and apt-get install selinux-policy-default fixed the permission problems and LXDE now works great on my Sony Xperia Tablet Z

Solution 2

or you do in android terminal:

...$ su
...# setenforce 0

Comments

[Admin]

Doesn't the dot at the end of the attributes list from ls indicate that the file has an SELinux ACL associated with it? See What does the dot mean at the end of -rw-r--r--.