Michael Sullivan schreef: > My network updates its software every night at midnight. There was a > problem with a couple of blocking packages night before last, so I > unmerged the two blocking packages and did the emerge -avuD world in a > screen. Now they're done and I can no longer su - to root from my > personal account. I have to log completely out and then log in as root > from the login screen. I use users-admin for my user maintenance, but > now there's a tab that says "User Privileges" where the "User's Groups" > tab used to be, so I can't figure out how to make sure that my personal > account is in the right group(s) to su - to root. A lot of things are > different now. I keep a gnome-terminal open at all times and it the > prompt now shows "[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $" when I'm in my home directory > instead of "[EMAIL PROTECTED] michael $" which I preferred. I could su - to > root yesterday while the upgrades were taking place and root's prompt > was the same. And then my Inbox Monitor applet is gone, so I have to > click on the running evolution button every time I want to see if I have > any email (which is quite often actually). Is there any way I can fix > all this, or at least get my su - privileges back? > >
Obviously the su to root issue is more important, but I know the cause of the other two issues (the change in the prompt and the loss of the mail checking tool). The change from "[EMAIL PROTECTED] explicit home directory name" to "[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~", is, I believe, a change in Bash, which only affects (afaik) the display name of the user's home directory. First of all, in Bash 3, the usage of /w and /W have been reversed; the lowercase now expands the full path display and the upper case truncates to just the cwd (current working directory). Somewhere in the revisions to Bash 2.05, the expansion of the /w and /W variables when in your /home was changed so that /home/username (or /root), which the /w variable already truncated (showing just the directory without the path to it), has been shortened from multiple characters (whose username is just one character?) to one character: ~, which is the commonly acknowledged abbreviation for /home/username. This affects the display no matter how deep you go into the user's /home directory (at least in Bash 3; I just upgraded, and I don't think Bash 2.05 -r9 did this)-- /home/username/.mozilla/firefox is now displayed as ~/.mozilla/firefox. I'm almost sure that yesterday (when I was still using Bash 2.05) it would have been /home/motub/.mozilla/firefox. But actually, I like it; I currently have my prompt split over 3 lines to prevent long cwds from destroying my prompt; this might mean I could lower that number to 2 lines, since the display of the cwd is much shorter by default. Other than that, I see no way to change it (it's a feature, not a bug), other than changing shells, which is also a possibility, of course-- but I, at least would need a better reason than that to go to the troule of learning a new shell, when I hardly know bash. ---------------------------------------------- As for the mail checker-- you must have upgraded from <=GNOME 2.8.x to GNOME 2.10. The previously included mail-notification utility does not work with GNOME 2.10, and in fact should have been removed. Try mail-notification (emerge mail-notification); it's a nice email checker for the GNOME panel whose benefit is that you can set it up to check both POP mail and GMail (possibly only if you have POP download enabled), as well as other types of accounts, such as IMAP or system mail. I have also used GBiff (emerge gnubiff), which is much cuter with a Povray Tux icon, but I don't believe it checks GMail. But for general use, it's fine, and has much the same featureset as mail-notification. And of course, there's GkrellM's mail notification plugin, gDesklets may a mail checking utility, and various dockapps provide this functionality as well, if you happen to use a dock. So you just have to use a different program of your choice, rather than relying on a pre-installed tool. ----------------------------------------------- As to the inability to su to root, assuming that the user is in the wheel group-- don't I remember hearing that this is some issue with the update to 'shadow'(or pam and shadow), and something has to be fixed in /etc/login.defs.... oh right, it's something about the SU_WHEEL_ONLY=yes, which sounds like it means that only the wheel group should be able to su, but in fact means that only members the ROOT group (who are also members of the wheel group) can su (due to another setting in another file which also restricts the ability to su)... I read here that the solution is to change this setting to NO. But that results, as I understand it, in everybody and their little sister being able to su to root, which is not really optimal. A better proposed solution is to reset SU_WHEEL_ONLY to 'no' and also to "create /etc/suauth with this single line... root:ALL EXCEPT GROUP wheel:DENY ...and now only members of the wheel group can su to root, while everybody can su to everybody else (password permitting)." [copy and paste from the forums] Hope this helps, Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
