14.16. Managing users on your system

userdrake is an advanced utility for Mandrake Linux which allows the System Administrator to easily add users to the system, to remove others, to arrange users in groups, and to manage groups in the same manner.

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

14.16.1. The interface

Launching userdrake will display the main window (figure 14-35), which lists the users currently defined on the system. You can switch from users to groups going to View->View groups.

Figure 14-35. 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 user database will be effective only after pressing the Save button. You can go back to the current users database at any time by going to File->Reload menu entry.

14.16.2. Let's add a new user

We created the standard user Queen Pingusa, at installation time, and now we need to create a new user called Peter Pingus, and then 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 14-36). The only field required is th login, you can also choose to add a comment, generally this is the full name of the user.

Figure 14-36. 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 14-37), shows 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 14-37. Affect users to a group

Note

All dialogs under userdrake have a little message just above the buttons. It generally says All is correct, but if you choose something ambiguous or which is not allowed, this message will warn you.

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

14.16.3. Other features

The parameters dialog (figure 14-38) accessible through View->Edit Parameters (Ctrl-P), allows you to tune the way lists are displayed and some other options.

Figure 14-38. The userdrake parameters window

First of all, users whose UID is lower than 500 are the 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 also allows you to choose default options for new users.

The following User view tab (figure 14-39),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 14-39. The userdrake user view parameters

Note

When you select various users and click the Edit button, if the groups to which they belong are different, then the display will be slightly different (figure 14-40): in that case, only the user Peter Pingus is a member of the group audio, then the item audio appears in light grey in both lists.

Figure 14-40. Groups are different for two users


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