Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Karl Larsen wrote:
I just re-started Users and Groups and clicked on Edit and preferences and
put an x in each of the spaces provided. Then I clicked on Help on the top and
then Help Contents and neither came up.
The main panel shows nothing but my user data. This is what I saw when I
first tried to make me a Group member of uucp. I could find nothing that has a
thing to do with uucp! When I click on my line it is just about my login. I
gave up.
I used #usermod karl -a -G uucp and that worked. It made karl a member of
group uucp.
Went back to Users and Groups trying to verify that usermod did the trick.
This time I clicked Edit again and saw preferences and clicked on that. I saw
all the things with an x in them and thought this must be right. But just to
be sure I removed all the x's.
To my amazement all the Users and Groups were displayed. I found uucp and
with the Group tab saw karl,uucp were group members. So it worked. I pretended
not to have my karl in the uucp group and clicked on the uucp group and up
came a Group properties window. It would be simple to find karl on that list
and put an x in that line.
So my two problems with this tool is the lack of help and the way it is
found the first time you use it.
There needs to be a way to tell the people working on this application what
is wrong. It is not a bug but it needs to get to them.
but there's a *reason* it's done this way, karl. typically, when you
start adding new users, you're not going to add them to the system
groups.
I was not adding a new user or group.
what you'd normally do is first create some new groups like,
say, "sales", "marketing", "helpdesk" and so on. try it -- create a
new group called "sales". you'll notice that it shows up in the list
when you ask to see the list of current groups.
I have no need for a new user.
now when you create new users, you can choose to add them to your new
(non-system) groups. that's the way it's *supposed* to work. you're
not supposed to commonly add users to the *system* groups -- that's
why those groups are, by default, not displayed. if, by chance, you
really *need* to do that, it's still available. but that's not
displayed by default because it's not encouraged behaviour, that's
all.
Why did someone invent "usermod"? And when you do a ls -l on /dev/ttyS0,
the first serial port you notice:
[root@k5di ~]# ls -al /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 64 2007-12-07 04:52 /dev/ttyS0
[root@k5di ~]#
The only way I can ever use Com1 is to be root or belong to the uucp Group.
you generally need a really good reason to add a user to a
system group.
I and many others will find really good reasons.
Karl
rday
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
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--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
