Couldn't find any info on this with LQ or Google searches.....

Ever since I've used Slackware, I've always left the default inittab setting to boot into init 3, then started x manually. I recently decided that I wanted to use a custom login screen, so I installed the moodin plugin and changed my inittab file so that I would boot into init 4.

After doing this, as a regular user, I could no longer access my CD-RW device through k3b, and I could no longer get sounds with flash content. I had to add my user to both the cdrom and audio groups to get those items to work. I know adding the mooding plugin shouldn't have affected permissions, but I didn't think changing the default bootup runlevel would.

Those are the only changes I made to the computer. What caused the permissions changes, and since those were somehow changed, what other permissions may have changed that I may not have noticed yet? (Everything else appears to be ok).

I've been running Slackware for a long time, and I've never seen a problem with permissions changing when going from init 3 to 4. The only thing that's changing there is what services are loading, unloading. To prove this point, change the init back to 3 and see what happens with audio.

Here's a tip I just figured out which you might want to check on: Make sure the etc/fstab file is readable by everyone, or at very least readable/accessibly to you the 'user'.
A while back I went on a security binge and chmodded and un-SUIDed a lot of stuff, among them was that file.
I didn't realize that this was why I couldn't seem to mount anything anywhere except as root, despite allowing user/users in fstab.
Also make sure that mount and umount are executable by user/group as well.

PS - My DVD player software and music player weren't allowed accessing the CD-drives either until this change.

That would actually be Slackwares defaults; Slack is quite tight by
default, and users don't have access to audio or cdrom devices until
explicitly granted.

I can't see how that would relate to the default runlevel, though.

And as for permissions: you can check all files against MAINFEST.bz2
on your Slackware CD - it holds all relevant info.



Cheers,
Tink

That makes sense with other posts I've seen where users couldn't access audio or cdrom in Slackware, but on both 10.2 and 11, my default install let normal users access those things without me having to modify anything, that's what's confusing to me. I really didn't think changing runlevel could do anything, but that was the only system related change I actually made. I think I'm just going to chalk this one up to random weirdness.

I don't think changing the runlevel actually did it.
I can't accurately comment on how the default config was set up on my system, as I'm 2 months new to linux, and have made a lot of tune-ups and changes since I installed Slackware. That said, I had been having mount problems or 'issues' ever since day one, which are now 100% solved and working great, now that I know what I'm doing a little better

I had occasion to try this again with a fresh Slackware installation, and was able to reproduce the same behavior. The initial user that I created was able to access cdrom, video, and several other groups with no additional configuration after install (although when I did the "groups" command, it showed no groups). When I changed the system to init 4, I could no longer access the cdrom, anything requiring 3D acceleration, etc., until I manually added the user to those groups.

Not really a problem, but now I at least know when it happened.