16.19. 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 only focus on users here. Group management is very similar.

16.19.1. The Interface

Launching userdrake will display the main window (figure 16-51), which lists the users currently defined on the system. You can switch from users to groups while accessing the View->View groups sub-menu.

Figure 16-51. 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 accessing the File->Reload menu entry.

16.19.2. Adding a New User

We created the standard user Queen Pingusa at installation time, and now we want to create a new user called Peter Pingus, and then make them both members of the group urpmi, so they can install packages without having root password.

Click on the Add button, the dialog to add a new user will pop up (figure 16-52). The only field required is the login. You can also choose to add a comment, generally this is the full name of the user.

Figure 16-52. Adding a New User in The System

We now have two users in our list. Select both of them with your mouse (clicking the first one, and moving the cursor to the second without releasing the button), and click on the Edit button. The following dialog (figure 16-53) 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 16-53. 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 in the users list that the last field (Groups) contains the urpmi group.

16.19.3. Other Features

The parameters dialog (figure 16-54) accessible through View->Edit Parameters (Ctrl-P) allows you to tune the way lists are displayed and some other options.

Figure 16-54. userdrake's Parameters Window

First of all, users whose UID is lower than 500 are the virtual users utilized by the system and which 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 16-55) 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 aim of the Group view is exactly the same as the preceding one.

Figure 16-55. userdrake's 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 16-56): in that case, only the user Peter is a member of the audio group, then the audio item appears in light gray in both lists.

Figure 16-56. Groups Are Different For Two Users


Tux on Star from MandrakeSoft Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.
Unless otherwise stated, all the content of these pages and all images are Copyright MandrakeSoft S.A. and MandrakeSoft Inc. 2002.
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/