On Wednesday, 27 December 2006 at 20:14, Paul Michael Reilly wrote: > I've made my FC6 laptop available to family members (including grandma) > as a shared machine. I've taught them to log into their own session > using "switch user" so that they are on their own vt session. Works > nice until they want to share devices, like audio and the CD burner. > For FC6 I have to take pains to set up permissions appropriately but it > does occur to me to ask how Rawhide should deal with this. There seem > to be two schools of thought: > > 1) Sharing devices automagically is a no-brainer; it must be turned on > by default. > > 2) Sharing devices is a security weakness and no self respecting distro > would enable such a thing by default. > > It's all well and good when the PC is set up by a someone reading any of > the Redhat lists but should there come a day when Dell (or some such) > ships RHEL this issue and lots more like it will be on the table. > > It does occur to me that maybe the current user (the one who currently > owns X, the "selected" user for lack of a better description) should > dynamically own devices but this is not very satisfying: perhaps the > various users set their own special IM sounds in which case the distro > is setting policy rather than mechanism. So the issue does get > complicated quickly. Left to my own devices, I'd share the devices by > default and build in the ability to graphically configure device sharing > which smacks of a desktop (Gnome/KDE/Xfce/?) solution which might just > already exist and I haven't come across such a beast. You could put a question in anaconda (or firstboot) if you want to share devices with console users by default and configure accordingly (g+rw for devices and add local users to some special group?)