Hi folks, I filed a bug against gnome-power-manager a little while ago because I could not suspend. It turned out my user was not in the powerdev group. It was Joss' initial belief that the non-root user that you create in d-i is added to a fixed set of groups, including powerdev. For the remainder of this mail, I will refer to this user as the "primary user", for clarity's sake.[1] I did several subsequent installs and my user never ended up in powerdev (nor netdev for that matter). It's my belief (yet to check d-i code to confirm) that the user gets added to powerdev if you select the desktop task: for each of my installs I only chose standard system and then subsequently installed a desktop environment (a subset of the task). I think it would be nice to explore better ways of handling group membership for users, in particular the "primary user", or perhaps primary users plural, in time for squeeze. If there was a system-wide way of defining a set of primary users, packages could then make the decision to add those users to groups at install time. So pm-utils could add the primary users to the powerdev group; fuse-utils to the fuse group, etc. Perhaps another group could be used to define this set of users: the relevant postinst would inspect the group "primary" and add any users in that group to the relevant group. This is me thinking out loud rather than proposing a well-rounded solution. I'm curious who else thinks that there is room for improvement here? Can anyone see some immediate flaws with my back-of-the-envelope idea above? Finally can anyone with a deeper insight of the issues explain whether or not the frustrating "existing logins don't inherit new groups" behaviour is fixable, or is that deeply rooted in UNIX tradition? (I note that it seems HAL makes an on-invocation group check for suspend so adding a user to the powerdev group and attempting a suspend from a pre-logged in session works) [1] I don't think this is a great name, suggestions welcome -- Jon Dowland
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