Couple of Linux questions...

[ST4RCUTTER]

Hey guys, I've finally figured enough out to work from my Linux laptop confortably but now I have a few small questions. Perhaps some of ya'll could help me out here?

Questions:

1. When I shutdown using "shutdown now," all processes seem to terminate and my user logs out but when I power down and restart I get a message saying my system has not been halted properly. The problem is, I can wait for an entire day after the shutdown and I never see a "system halted" or "halted" message. Is there anything else I need to enter besides "shutdown now"? There is a prompt, but it's not the traditional [username@XXX /user]$. What am I missing?

2. How do you activate your NIC from the console? Doing this from KDE is easy...from console I can't seem to find the command (guess I need to get a better book like Running Linux).

3. How do I alter a user's permissions to access specific devices...like a NIC or CDROM?

Thanks!

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: ST4RCUTTER
Hey guys, I've finally figured enough out to work from my Linux laptop confortably

golf clap 😀

but now I have a few small questions. Perhaps some of ya'll could help me out here?

Questions:

1. When I shutdown using "shutdown now," all processes seem to terminate and my user logs out but when I power down and restart I get a message saying my system has not been halted properly. The problem is, I can wait for an entire day after the shutdown and I never see a "system halted" or "halted" message. Is there anything else I need to enter besides "shutdown now"? There is a prompt, but it's not the traditional [username@XXX /user]$. What am I missing?

I usually go with the shutdown -h now. That tells the machine to halt (-h). -r would be a reboot. If you have the apm stuff (power management doohickies, I never use it) installed you can do shutdown -hp now and it should automatically power off too.

If that doesnt work, what kind of prompt are you getting?

2. How do you activate your NIC from the console? Doing this from KDE is easy...from console I can't seem to find the command (guess I need to get a better book like Running Linux).

ifconfig is the command you will use most when it comes to your NIC. Ill let you look at the man page to determine what you need. If you have questions on the man page, please ask.

3. How do I alter a user's permissions to access specific devices...like a NIC or CDROM?

Thanks!

Im not sure why a user would need to access a NIC... But you could add him to whichever group for the cdrom and modify permissions accordingly, or just modify the permissions.

 

[Nothinman]

2. How do you activate your NIC from the console?

Most distros come with ifup/ifdown scripts so that you can type 'ifup eth0' to bring the NIC up.

3. How do I alter a user's permissions to access specific devices...like a NIC or CDROM?

For the NIC if you mean let a user bring it up and down, it depends on distro. For the cdrom you would just add them to a group that has the appropriate access to that device, for instance Debian creates a 'cdrom' group with read-write access to the cdroms.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Thanks guys!

Logging out with "shutdown -h now" completely and safely shuts down my computer (power too). I will check out the included utilities to see what's available as far as directly controlling the PCMCIA NIC. I will also play around with the permissions. So far so good...very happy with RH Linux 🙂

 

[earthman]

a handy way to control access is with a custom group for whatever device, command or file you want to deal with, just add the appropriate users including root to it and set the gid on the device or file.