Arch Linux

Gamonics

Member

From: Rhode Island, USA

Registered: 2015-02-10

Posts: 40

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Appropriate UID/GID for user accounts when dual-booting Arch and OSX

Relatively new Arch user here. See my intro in the intro thread (any way to link to a specific post like #4455 in this forum?) if interested. Searched for other posts related to this question, but found none. Not sure if this is the best sub-forum or not, but (pardon my relative inexperience in Arch forums) it seems to fit to me.

Both this and this mention that it might be a good idea to create normal user accounts in Arch with useradd using the already existing UIDs and GIDs from OSX user accounts.

At least one other person in this forum had concerns about this idea, but I guess it's ok for UIDs.

My question is about GIDs. In OSX, GID 20 is "staff" whereas in Arch, GID 20 is "utmp", right?

In OSX, the output of "id" is below:

$ id
uid=501(alpha) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),12(everyone),61(localaccounts),79(_appserverusr),80(admin),81(_appserveradm),98(_lpadmin),701(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1),33(_appstore),100(_lpoperator),204(_developer),398(com.apple.access_screensharing),399(com.apple.access_ssh)

So if I do in Arch:

# useradd -m -u 501 -g 20 -G 12,61,79,80,81,98,701,33,100,204,398,399 -s /bin/bash newuser1

...isn't that going to cause some problems?

Should the Arch wiki guidance in the two links at the top of this post be revised?

And if the

# useradd

line I proposed will indeed cause problems in Arch (as it seems almost certain that it would), then what's the best way to try and avoid conflicts of the sort that those wiki article suggestions are apparently trying to help with?

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Arch. I'm very impressed with it, and it seems like exactly the kind of distro and community for me. I look forward to ending the previously-endless distro-hopping cycle that I had been on for so many years.

r0b0t

Member

From: /tmp

Registered: 2009-05-24

Posts: 505

Re: Appropriate UID/GID for user accounts when dual-booting Arch and OSX

If the reason of all this is just to access some files I'd suggest you to simply create a user with uid 501 and you will be good with it , however I'm no OSX user so maybe you should wait for experienced OSX users comments.

As for the problems if you do just the above it won't cause more problems that what the same user could cause on OSX, that of course without taking in to consideration file-system related descrepancies (if any).
From the other point of view by creating just a simple user you can switch to that and do whatever you need on OSX
However if I'm not mistaken with the right drivers you can do the same without changes.