HD permissions stay put

[夜神 岩男]

On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 21:42 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
> On 7/3/2011 9:33 PM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
> > On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 20:38 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
> > [...]
> >
> > Creating that first user throught the firstboot dialogue isn't required,
> > it is just a nice way to get the ball rolling. You can<ctrl><alt><f2>
> > to the next tty and login as root right then yourself and reboot again,
> > now skipping the firstboot process and nothing will be broken in the
> > system -- you will just have to manually add the first user because GDM
> > will not have a method available for you to log in now (I believe root
> > logins through GDM are disabled by default still?).
> 
> Without a default user given that one can't log in a root, I don't see 
> how I can get into "a user" that I can su -l from.

The root account already exists, and you can log directly into it from a
text login prompt. You just can't do it through GDM, so you will have to
hop to another tty by hitting <ctrl>+<alt>+<f2> or boot to runlevel 3
(or the equivalent now that we are in the opening days or systemd). In
this case you are not "su -" to anything, you really are logged in as
root.

> > Anyway, your options are to disregard creating that firstboot prompted
> > user (a prompt I rarely see since I tend to install across the network
> > via PXE boot -- which boots to a text configurature for networking and
> > some other things, and then boots to runlevel 3 by default with no user
> > accounts created) or just create a trash user account you won't use or
> > delete later. Its up to you, really -- none of the useradd schenanigans
> > you play are going to hurt the system in any way as long as they are>=
> > 500 on Fedora and>= 1000 on Debian.
> >
> Friends run different Linuxes (is that the right plural?) and I'd prefer 
> to have a pid/gid that is valid on both. Never bumped into issue before 
> but my needs for Linux are changing and this might be an issue in the 
> future, so I wanted to know what to do.

Any UID/GID >= 1000 will do in that case. So far Debian based distros
are the ones that require this, and since Fedora has no problems
handling it everything works just fine (at least for me so far). You
will get some weird things happening if you share your actual home
folder dot files, though -- Ubuntu does weird things and Fedora now does
(other) weird things and they don't always agree -- so you can find
bizaar artifacts from one settings style in the other. But that is
survivable, just weird. (The way around this involves segregating your
data from your dotfiles and mounting different /home partition locations
on different distros and mounting data holding directories from
somewhere else -- due to Unix filesystem magic it all looks the same to
the user, but it keeps idiosyncracies between distros cleanly
segregated, which is nice. As long as the UIDs are all the same and
acceptable to all distros, you won't notice a thing.)

> It sounds easier to do a scratch then play with runlevels, but I 
> appreciate knowing there is a bypass if I want to figure out a way to 
> boot into root (I presume runlevels?)

After you mess with this a bit yourself you'll see how easy it all is.
All this talk is fun, but you'll really get it when you sit down and
play with your own toys. The things you discover will help you a lot
when it comes to removable media you've formatted to ext3/4 or something
similar -- or package prebuilds that have bizaar UIDs owning files
(Drupal contains several packages in their binary distro that are owned
by UID 6336 by mistake).

-Iwao