SuSE can't find a man...

jsheffie · 06-10-2005, 08:46 AM

Hey,

For some reason I cannot man anything in my box. I receive the following error

man: Failed su to user man

the last major thing I did was upgrade from KDE 3.3 to KDE 3.4.1. I think it was working after I did the upgrade but I do not know for sure.
I am running SuSE 9.2

any quick suggestions on what to check first?

Thanks
-Me

Simon Bridge · 06-11-2005, 04:26 AM

1. check if there is a user called man
2. go find the man pages and look at the permissions
3. try texinfo (if installed) "info <page>" and see what happens

In my case, man pages have user and owner = root and read access for everybody. Your error message seems to be saying that you have to be user=man to read the pages. This dosn't make sence to me but it may be right for SuSE.

Of course, if you are really serious about getting SuSE to find a man ... perhaps I could introduce her to my brother ... ?

SharpyWarpy · 02-25-2007, 06:26 PM

Well, I know this is an old thread but I've got a little time to kill.
I had this same problem after I install Suse 10.0 on a laptop, struggled with it for a while. Finally I issued this command:
useradd man
and that did the trick.

Simon Bridge · 02-26-2007, 02:07 AM

jsheffie: how did you get on?