Users and Groups

[Michael A Peters]

On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 17:27 -0700, Karl Larsen wrote:

> >   
>     Sorry. I am a stupid PHd. But if those able to use /dev/ttyS0 are 
> root and uucp how do any others use it?

What that does - it assigns ownership to the console user, which (in
most cases) is the person physically logged into the machine. If there
is no console user, it reverts to root:uucp ownership.

It's controlled by pam_console - and has been a documented feature of
red hat based distributions for a very long time.

Your sound card probably works the same way, only you didn't have to
configure it manually.