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Wiki says that normal, non-privileged users can and should be given membership in the following groups:
audio - for tasks involving sound card and related software
floppy - for access to a floppy if applicable
lp - for managing printing tasks
optical - for managing tasks pertaining to the optical drive(s)
storage - for managing storage devices
video - for video tasks and hardware acceleration
wheel - for using sudo
power - used w/ power options (e.g.: shutdown with power button)
What I'm interested is the examples of the typical tasks (besides mentioned on Wiki) that require membership in these groups: storage, video, power, camera, games.
If someone could break it down nicely I would be much obliged. Thank you.
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Storage allows you to (un)mount removable media as user in graphical file managers (when HAL is involved).
Power allows you t resume/suspend/shutdown/reboot as user.
Some games set the permissions on their executables so that a non-member of the games group can't start the game.
For the others, I have no idea unfortunately. By the way, the groups are to be deprecated in the (rather far?) future since you are supposed to get proper permissions when you need them. I think ConsoleKit is involved in that IIRC.
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Storage allows you to (un)mount removable media as user in graphical file managers (when HAL is involved).
Power allows you t resume/suspend/shutdown/reboot as user.
Some games set the permissions on their executables so that a non-member of the games group can't start the game.For the others, I have no idea unfortunately. By the way, the groups are to be deprecated in the (rather far?) future since you are supposed to get proper permissions when you need them. I think ConsoleKit is involved in that IIRC.
Thanks for a quick reply. That's an interesting idea to grant privileges dynamically on demand. Haven't heard of it yet. Where can I read about it more?
Last edited by xCrucialDudex (2010-02-26 09:38:07)
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Thanks for a quick reply. That's an interesting idea to grant privileges dynamically on demand. Haven't heard of it yet. Where can I read about it more?
Well, if I had reference, I'd have posted a link I've read it somewhere around the forums here, looking for a specific thread ATM.
Edit: E.g. JGC said it in this thread.
Last edited by Runiq (2010-02-26 09:47:27)
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Hmm... intersting. Thanks for the link!
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In my experience, the handling of groups is quite inconsistent; often you don't need group membership and often permissions are handled by some entirely different mechanism (the *kits come to mind).
Currently, the only groups I'm a member of are wheel, audio and users. I do remember that audio is actually required. Everything else is working as expected without group memberships.
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In my experience, the handling of groups is quite inconsistent; often you don't need group membership and often permissions are handled by some entirely different mechanism (the *kits come to mind).
Currently, the only groups I'm a member of are wheel, audio and users. I do remember that audio is actually required. Everything else is working as expected without group memberships.
Pretty much true hence my original inquiry.
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'camera' group is needed for accessing photo cameras through the libgphoto2 library. No idea about 'video' though
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