On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 03:22:21PM +0100, S. Hakim Hamdani wrote: > > > That would be appreciated, also from my side. I found it a bit strange > > yesterday, when I reinstalled debian on a laptop, that I couldn?t login as > > root graphically, and also that as a normal user I can?t shutdown or reboot > > graphically or in text. Only via su. > > This reminds me of a situation I faced over the summer. I was > demonstrating something to a work-colleague and I was using X. So, I > instructed my window manager to exit, which returned me to wdm's login > screen. I then entered my username and password and changed the > drop-down box to 'reboot' (I think). > > My colleague remarked on how I had to log out and then 'login' (or at > least re-authenticate) to reboot the computer. He is from a different > school of OS thought ;-) > > This has been nagging at me since. I thought the solution might be a > package to manage permissions for users performing these operations, > which could be driven from the menu-system. Does anyone have any > thoughts about this?
/etc/gdm/gdm.conf (although I do not know whether you run gdm) offers a setting like this: # The system menu requires the root password for all options SecureSystemMenu=true I changed it to SecureSystemMenu=false and after this, (and after the login screen again wanted the root passwd for a while in spite of this change, as it seems) I was able to reboot the machine without providing any passwd. The login screen still wants the root password if I want to make changes to the login settings etc. So it seems, setting the option above to 'false' only lets me reboot (shutdown?, suspend?) the system. Which is exatly what I want. HTH Best Regards, Wolfgang > > -- Profile, Links: http://profiles.yahoo.com/wolfgangpfeiffer -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]