Re: How to enable logout/halt/reboot as ordinary user?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Svante Signell <svante.signell@telia.com> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> I have been running redhat rawhide with enlightenment and gnome for
> some time now. Recently another machine got debian slink installed,
> upgraded to potato. In rawhide an ordinary user can log out of X,
> reboot or halt the computer, just by supplying the user password. How
> to enable this also in potato? (In potato the logout button in the
> gnome panel only enable you to exit from X!)

The shutdown/reboot functionality in the logout dialog
is based on a package called 'usermode' which build on top of
the PAM authentication system. usermode is a bit like
sudo in concept - it allows users to run certain commands
that they wouldn't normally have access to, based on 
authentication through PAM. Usermode, however, is more useable in
GUI environments, more configurable in some ways (PAM is
almost infinitely configurable), and more transparent
to the user.

Potato does use PAM, at least in part, so it would be 
possible to port usermode, though it wouldn't be 
trivial, as Debian doesn't seem to be currently using the
pam-console part of PAM which is used to give special
privileges to users logged in at the console.

Actually, the dependence between gnome-session and usermode
for this facility is small - all gnome-session does is make
some simple checks to see if the facility is there, and
if it is there, adds the extra options and exec()'s a 
given command upon logout instead of exiting. So it wouldn't
be at all hard to adapt to some other method of user
rebooting.

Regards,
                                        Owen