Sharing devices "out of the box"

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Wednesday, 27 December 2006 at 20:14, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> I've made my FC6 laptop available to family members (including grandma) 
> as a shared machine.  I've taught them to log into their own session 
> using "switch user" so that they are on their own vt session.  Works 
> nice until they want to share devices, like audio and the CD burner. 
> For FC6 I have to take pains to set up permissions appropriately but it 
> does occur to me to ask how Rawhide should deal with this.  There seem 
> to be two schools of thought:
> 
> 1) Sharing devices automagically is a no-brainer; it must be turned on 
> by default.
> 
> 2) Sharing devices is a security weakness and no self respecting distro 
> would enable such a thing by default.
> 
> It's all well and good when the PC is set up by a someone reading any of 
> the Redhat lists but should there come a day when Dell (or some such) 
> ships RHEL this issue and lots more like it will be on the table.
> 
> It does occur to me that maybe the current user (the one who currently 
> owns X, the "selected" user for lack of a better description) should 
> dynamically own devices but this is not very satisfying: perhaps the 
> various users set their own special IM sounds in which case the distro 
> is setting policy rather than mechanism.  So the issue does get 
> complicated quickly.  Left to my own devices, I'd share the devices by 
> default and build in the ability to graphically configure device sharing 
> which smacks of a desktop (Gnome/KDE/Xfce/?) solution which might just 
> already exist and I haven't come across such a beast.

You could put a question in anaconda (or firstboot) if you want to share
devices with console users by default and configure accordingly (g+rw for
devices and add local users to some special group?)

On another note, I've just had an idea: upon installation, you are first
presented not with a choice of software (that comes later), but with
"profiles" (for a lack of a better term).

For example:
1. mobile/laptop
2. desktop/workstation
3. server

1 will get, for example, bluetooth, wireless and NetworkManager enabled by
default.
2 will get none of the above (by default)
3 will get no Xserver and desktop environments

I think something like that was present in earlier RedHat releases.

Regards,
R.

-- 
Fedora Extras contributor  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DominikMierzejewski
Livna contributor http://rpm.livna.org MPlayer developer http://mplayerhq.hu
"Faith manages."
        -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"