My situation:
Okay. I have debian, mandriva, and opensuse all on one hard drive. All three have their own root partition. All three share a /data partition. This way no matter which distro I'm using i can login with the same user name and use the same hidden dot files for configuration of things like pidgin, gajim, claws-mail, and many others. With this setup i can also access my documents, CrossOver Linux, and mail folders. It works very well because I can check claws-mail and read my email in any distro. I only download my mail once into the data partition and check it anywhere I am working at. Same thing for documents and so on. So far so good.
Then i threw elive in the computer and took it for a spin. I thought this is really sweet and it's Debian so it's rock solid. Looks beautiful too (except for some of the gtk things but that's my own opinion). Anyway, I was for the most part really impressed.
So, I said to myself I'll just install this over my Debian partition. It's debian anyway. That's when I started having problems.
I don't know why, but elive handles adding users completely different than mandriva, debian, and opensuse. elive picked the user ID's for the three users on my box and placed them into all these many different groups. I can't even remember the names or how many.
If anyone is reading this you're probably thinking so what's wrong with that? What's the big deal? Well, the problem is that when elive does this you know longer own your own folders when you switch to another linux flavor on the same hard drive. you lose write access to your own files! Okay, so I thought i'll just open up a terminal and use the command "useradd". But when I did that I get this peculiar elive message warning me not to do it this way and that i had better use the special elive tool for adding users. that wouldn't be so bad i guess except for these few things:
1. You can't change the id number of the user. If you can't do that you can't use your own files when you change to a different linux distro.
2. Ditto for changing the group.
3. There isn't any "manage groups" setting so that you can change which groups your users belong to.
4. In the other distros I use, including debian, all of us belong to
one group and that's users and all of us can access the cd and dvd roms etc.
So why is this a problem some may wonder.
If you want to share the same files and the same settings while playing with another flavor linux like mandriva or opensuse it's an enormous problem. you just can't access your own files. The reason is because all users need to belong to the same group, have the same group ID and the same user ID. Other linux flavors (including debian!) let you do this painlessly.
Another problem is that if you ignore elive's warning and use the 'useradd' command anyway you won't be able to access your own devices like your dvd or cd roms. at least i couldn't. they wouldn't mount.
Needless to say I didn't keep elive installed for long. I reinstalled plain old debian right over it.
It's too bad because elive looks great in many ways (however it needs more font configurability) and runs quickly and is based on one of the best distros out there, debian.
I'd like to see elive pull in the system configuration tools from GNOME. That would mean using some GNOME libraries but so what . It would definitely increase the usability of elive. Also I think it's a very bad idea to have an application to add users that tells you not to use the command line to add users. Not all elive users are going to be complete noobs.
I hope this didn't sound real negative. I think the man behind elive is onto something great here but I just can't use it right now until the users and group settings are finessed a bit. I suggest having GNOME's system admin. apps. made easily available by having them installed by default.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2008 10:56PM by chytraeus.