Users and Groups

[Robert P. J. Day]

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.  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.

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.  you generally need a really good reason to add a user to a
system group.

rday

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
========================================================================