11.8. Userdrake: Manage users on your system

Userdrake is an advanced utility for Linux-Mandrake which allows the system administrator to easily add users to the system, remove ones, affect users to groups, and manage groups in the same manner.

We will focus on users only here, groups management is very similar.

11.8.1. The interface

Launching Userdrake will display the main window (figure 11-14), which lists the users currently defined on the system. You can switch from users to groups going to View->View groups.

Figure 11-14. The users list in Userdrake

The topology of the window is standard, the three buttons Add, Edit and Remove are also accessible from the Action menu.

You can make as many changes as you wish, the effect on your users database will be effective only after pressing the Saving button. You can go back to the current users database at any moment going to the File->Reload menu entry.

11.8.2. Let's add a new user

We already created at installation time the standard user Queen Amidala, and we need now to create a new user Darth Vader, and make them both members of the group urpmi, so that they can install packages without having root password.

Click on the Add button, the dialog to add a new user will pop-up (figure 11-15). The only field required is th login, you can also choose to add a comment, generally the full name of the user.

Figure 11-15. Adding a new user in the system

We have now two users in our list, select both of them with your mouse (clicking the first one, and move the cursor to the second without releasing the button), and click the Edit button. The dialog which displays now (figure 11-16), presents the list of available groups on the right, and the list of groups of which the selected users are members. look for the urpmi group on the right, highlight it by clicking on it and click the Add button between the two lists.

Figure 11-16. Affect users to a group

Note

All dialogs under Userdrake have a little message just on top of the buttons. It generally says All is correct, but in case that you choose something ambiguous or not allowed, this message will warn you.

After clicking OK, you can check on the users list, that the last field Groups contains effectively the group urpmi.

11.8.3. Other features

The parameters dialog (figure 11-17) accessible through View->Edit Parameters (Ctrl-P), allows you to tune the way lists are displayed and some options.

Figure 11-17. The Userdrake parameters window

First of all, users which UID is lower than 500 are virtual users used by the system and are not valid for real users. You can choose to display them or not in the users lists here. This dialog allows you also to choose some default options for new users.

The following User view tab (figure 11-18),allows you to select the fields to display in the users list. Simply deactivate the check box associated to the fields you are not interested in. The Group view tab has the same goal.

Figure 11-18. The Userdrake user view parameters

Note

When you select various users and click the Edit button, if the groups to which they belongs are different, then the display will be slightly different (figure 11-19): in that case, only the user Darth Vader is a member of the group audio, then the item audio appears in light grey in both lists.

Figure 11-19. Groups are different for two users


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