allowing non-root users to mount drives and shutdown
 

i have slackware 8.1 running on a laptop and it is driving me mad having to su root every time i want to mount a drive or shudown, does anyone know how i can allow non-root to do the above tasks.

cheers

rlpt

For mounting, you will need to adjust your entrie(s) in fstab. Something like:
/dev/hdxx /mnt/files ext2 users,noauto,rw 0 0

Could be what you need, but you would obviously need to tailor it, and add/remove things in the options section. man mount and man fstab will give you a better idea of what's going on there.

As for shutting down, I just do a 3 fingered salute. That does not require root priviledges. Of course if you want to shutdown and halt, you can still do the 3 finger, but need to adjust in /etc/inittab what the entry says for the 3 fingered. Make it -h rather than -r for halt rather than reboot respectively.

Cool

thanks! i can now mount drives as a none root user but when i ctrl-alt-del nothing happens :(, the only reasons i can think of for it not working is the fact that im in X when i do it or that because my laptop has less keys than a real keyboard the delete key im using is sending the wrong signal.

cheers

rlpt

For shutdown I used sudo to allow selected users to shutdown the computer.

Read the manpages on sudo, sudoers, and visudo.

Sudo explains about what sudo is and how it works.

Sudoers tells how the file is built and has samples of entries you need to make it work.

Visudo is the program used to edit the sudoers file.