When running "sudo dmidecode" I get the following output:
johnny@johns-laptop:~$ sudo dmidecode
# dmidecode 2.12
# SMBIOS entry point at 0xa9e84010
/dev/mem: Operation not permitted
johnny@johns-laptop:~$
A search for this topic yielded only threads where requestor wanted to access /dev/mem as non-root, or was trying to do something much more complicated than this.
As a background - about 2 months ago my desktop wouldn't launch at all after a software update and I resolved it by creating another user and copying files over. So it's possible I wasn't thorough enough when I set the new username up with root privileges...
I would describe my experience level as noob-ish.
sudoers file...
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults env_reset
Defaults mail_badpass
Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
# Host alias specification
# User alias specification
# Cmnd alias specification
# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:
#includedir /etc/sudoers.d
johnny@johns-laptop:~$ ls -l /dev/mem
crw-r----- 1 root kmem 1, 1 Dec 20 09:22 /dev/mem
johnny@johns-laptop:~$ lsattr /dev/mem
lsattr: Operation not supported While reading flags on /dev/mem
johnny@johns-laptop:~$ ^C
johnny@johns-laptop:~$
