On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 21:33 -0600, M Harris wrote:
> On Monday 26 February 2007 21:01, John Andersen wrote:
> > >       If yes to the above, what message comes back?
> >
> > More to the point, if you press and hold the power button
> > what happens?  Shutdown? Yup.  
>       heh... no no no , actually... I was trying to do some diagnostics with 
> MacGyver...  I want to find out (on his box) whether the machine as a suspend 
> button, whether it is grayed out, and if not what message he gets back when 
> an average user presses it...  I would like to know what happens on his box 
> when someone other than root tries to suspend the system from the desktop. 
> I'm actually out of the debating mode now and am really trying to help him. 
> (I know, hard to believe)
>       
> --


Sorry for not replying yesterday, had some other things that required
looking at. (not PC related)

Short answer, yes, there is a suspend option, and yes, it is active and
not greyed out...

Longer answer, it isn't Kde, it's Gnome, and "Log Out", "Shut Down"
"Restart" and "Suspend" are the 4 options.

When I choose the "Suspend" option, screen flickers, then the screen
gets to the locked screen as if it had been locked manually or
screensaver had started...

When log back in, an error message pops up with a link (an old one at
that) to the Gnome site...
This link was kind of less than helpful, because it always assumed that
the problem was down to hardware issues, which this wasn't as root could
do it no problem.
(if acpi/hardware, root'd not be able to do it, which is the case with
the machine I am now writing this mail on - i've never got it to
hibernate - so kinda resigned to that for this box)


I did a bit more digging, and found that a local user (/etc/passwd) can
suspend the machine properly, but an LDAP authenticated one couldn't.

At this time, also found a minor error in my LDAP config which I fixed
(clicked on wrong option on install, i'd set the Group Map ou to be the
user ou, oooops)
Have to say here, this didn't change anything with the suspend/hibernate
issue mind....

After what I'd read about /etc/Policykit/privilge.d/hal-power* files, i
did a bit of logic playing, and changed the "RequiredPrivileges=" option
to "RequiredPrivileges=desktop-console"

Restarted rdbus and rcpolicykitd, now things are working.

I did try, and then revert, the Allow=uid:root to Allow=uid:__all__, but
the whole point here was letting the person on the console do this
action - not all.
Remote connections as agreed, definitely shouldn't be able to do it
unless su'd to root, which is fair enough really...


What I suppose grieves me now that I have it working, is that it really
shouldn't be this hard.
Yast has no wrapper for this, which I kinda think it should, certainly
under the Power Management settings..

Yeah yeah, editing text files ain't hard for me or some others (i spend
90+% of working life at CLI, it's my job), but this is the kind of thing
that needs to have some thought, so that people that are new to *nix
don't have to go rumaging around for.

To be fair, Suse is far better with it's "gui" management tools than
Fedora, by almost a complete universe.


After all, the PC is a tool, bit like a air compressor... you can change
the bits on the end of the pipe (your programs) and you can be skilled
in getting "product" out, but you shouldn't have to open the case and
fiddle with the electronics inside just so pressing the power switch
turns it off.


Cheers

AM

>  
> Kind regards,
> 
> M Harris     <><
-- 
Angus MacGyver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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