Re: gnome feature or Ximian feature ?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 01:02:15PM +0200 or thereabouts, christophe barbé wrote:
> Is it possible for a program to check if Pam would allow or not a given
> program execution ? (I'm speaking about the logout dialog box which 
> IIRC is part of the gnome panel).  I know nearly nothing about Pam 
> authorization. What I am supposed to do to allow normal user to use 
> halt/shutdown with Pam ?

Well, first off, I wrote that on the basis of what I'd been told.
That pam was what let you (or didn't let you) reboot/halt as a
user. It is, but I was misleading. (I was misled myself :))

Ximian remove the options. But if the options were there, it would
be pam which allowed non-root users to do them. They're still there
in the gdm login screen, apparently, if you want them.

Pam is not something users have to know about, and this is my
excuse for getting it all wrong :) It's something systems admins
might know about. The docs are in /usr/(share/)doc/pam* in text
or HTML format on a Linux box, and they are incomprehensible to 
me. Possibly I should upgrade a few things, but my docs are also
two years old, and my Gnome is a lot newer. 

And of course I have now learned this pam stuff is actually 
irrelevant to whether the menu shows you all the extra options 
or not. It is just what runs if a user wants to pick an option
that normally only root can run. 

As I understand it, RH shows them all, Debian shows them all,
I dunno about the other Linux distros, and Ximian removes most
of the choices. I cannot find the patch in the src.rpm I
-think- it would be in, but I am not a coder and wouldn't
know it if it bit me. 

I hope this time I've got it right. I'm just going to give up
and hope someone is able to correct all this for me.

Telsa