Will KDE in etch support hotplug devices in large installations?
A common setup for installations with a lot of user is to leave it to
the PAM modules to add the console user to the groups required for
local access. A summary of this setup is available from
<URL:http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/10/msg00752.html> under
the pam_group heading.
This worked just fine with KDE in etch earlier. It does not work any
more. I'm told the reason is that KDE no longer uses pmount, but
passes the hotplug event on to hald. hald do not know of the groups
given to the console user by the PAM system, and thus do not mount
anything. The reason is that pmount was running as the logged in user
and inheriting all the groups of the logged in user, while hald is a
system daemon looking up the user in the group database. The latter
do not include the user as a member of the local device groups, and
can not do it either in an enterprise environment with 40000 users and
heterogenous unix environments.
Are there any hopes of having this problem fixed in time for etch?
KDE without support for hotplugged devices is a very big problem for
enterprise desktop settings.
The KDE/hald problem is explained in details in
<URL: http://bugs.debian.org/377689 >.
Friendly,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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