Mandrake, SuSe etc & console
 

Can i control mandrake via console as well as the normal way (grapihical) or is it ment to be mastered by using all its grapichal apps ?

the same question for suse, last time the "adduser" command didnt work in console..

ya u can
I have Mandrake running as server , CLI only

useradd is what u look for prolly

u can update the system with urpmi --update --auto-select
edit the syconfig.. what else do u want?
oh BitchX for irc, micq (icq in commandline) it's all there

useradd, adduser whatever .. didnt work in suse console .. maybe they are just using all their graphical apps to admin the computer..

i was just wondering if i can do everything that i can do in slackware console in mandrake console ( all standard linux cosole commands ) or do they have their own solutions

make sure you're root when u add users..
don't use capitals..

u can work with mandrake in console as much as slackware in console..

Yes, Mandrake 9.0 is a Linux System Base approved distro and comes with it. It is NOT default installed, but if you tell it to install or install the LSB later it works excellently.

With SuSE, you might find the Slackware command 'newuser' was adopted instead of 'adduser' or 'useradd'. Slack and SuSE and Deb had common roots, some of the commands among those three distros are very common. A book called "Linux System Commands," authored appropriately by Patrick Volkerding, is my reference of first choice for those commands. It is published under an IDG Worldwide line name of M&T Books.

For Mandrake, I have about 450 printed pages of stuff for 9.0 plus the man pages and infos and HOWTOs for commands. Any Mandrakian might want to look on Mandrake's sites and fetch themselves a set of doc files in pdf form if they do not own a copy of the PowerPAck or Suite. One of those is a CLI reference which covers especially Mandrake's way of adminning from the CLI.

Most of the Mandrake modules used in the Mandrake Control Center in the GUIs can be called by their module names in the CLI and will spawn DOS-LIKE config interfaces. XFdrake is useful for recovering from a GUI config disaster from the CLI, for example.

ps, pstree and top are naturally still around. Most of the Gnu commands doc'ed in the manual at Gnu.org work if you have the LSB RPM loaded.

John.

thanks for help

Happy to, this is a good virtual place to hang out.

John.

u do not have to use adduser at all, better and safer is do it manualy , log as root and edit passwd file and then make home directory for user

then just type passwd user-with u jast make and set passwd if you need...

This is nice, IF you do not want shadowed (encrypted with the key hidden) passwords. I like mine encrypted-- essentially, unless they are unencrypted AFTER someone grabs the file, they are useless if you encrypt them. To find the key would be harder than just to find the password file and one would need root access to do both.

But, for instance, to change passwords if shadowed, see

man chpw
man shadow

and for the other reasons on why to use the command see:
man useradd (with emphasis on the part about crypt if you are using Mandrake, and the part about group creation, and the part about expiration of user ID)(in my case, ALSO got to this with 'man adduser' which was aliased to useradd by default in Mandrake 9.0)
man crypt

Plain language passwords are an invitation to intrude, to anyone who can see them in plain characters. while you could manually make a user ID, encrypt the password, make a group ID, etc, why bother??? This way, you type in a password in plain characters and the silly thing gets autoencrypted and no-one sees the key used to encrypt much less the result. If you are the only user whoe will ever sit down at your console on your machine, you can do this the long way to learn, but know the other also for the times when you do not want your fellow game player to know exactly how to play tricks on you with your own box.

No, I am not ripping on you, nor flaming, this is how folks keep their jobs in life if as sysadmins-- by making it so hard for system burglars that they decide to burgle elsewhere, and by knowing things so well that they know when they are beaten (have been burgled) and can adapt with a change or changes to close that hole or holes that got the burglar access to their private info.

John.