Hi Hugh, On Sun, Aug 13, 2023 at 04:12:18PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I'm just setting up a debian system for the first time in a long while. (I'm typing this on my new debian system.)
The initial user that I created is automatically in many important groups: cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev netdev bluetooth lpadmin scanner silly <== the user gets its own group
When I do an adduser for "hugh", I get only two groups: users hugh
Why was "silly" not put into group "users"?
Why was "hugh" not put into all these empowering groups?
This is new in Bookworm, and I hadn't noticed it until you brought this up. You need to edit /etc/adduser.conf. For Bullseye, and as long as I can remember before that, EXTRA_GROUPS="dialout cdrom floppy audio video plugdev users". However, as a result of your question I've discovered that /etc/adduser.conf has been changed, and now EXTRA_GROUPS="users" in my Bookworm system. It seems that ADD_EXTRA_GROUPS has changed, too. It is 1 on a Bullseys system but 0 on Bookworm. This does not to appear to have prevented my users from being added to "users", though.
Is there a magic shortcut to getting hugh added to all these groups?
Don't know about a magic shortcut, but here is the command to add groups to a user: $ sudo usermod -a -G "group1,group2,group3,....,groupN" hugh [snip]
What's the normal way of adding users? I read debian documentation
Indeed, it is adduser, but with /etc/adduser.conf modified to suit your needs. I have no idea why this change was made in Debian. All the best, -- Znoteer znoteer@mailbox.org