[plug] USB & kernel questions

[Craig Ringer]

James Devenish wrote:
> In message <20031217091309.GA4657 at erdos.home>
> on Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:13:09PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
 >
>>One thing that you may have issues with in the particular case of
>>scanners and cameras is device "file" permissions and usbdevfs.
>>Currently I'm running my script to download photos from my USB camera as
>>root, but there must be a better way somewhere!
> 
> What do people do, with Linux, for similar problems such as CD/DVD
> access, audio access, etc? 

Many distros reconfigure the permssions on the appropriate devices so 
that the current graphical login session gets ownership of the devices. 
This is useful for one-user-at-a-time desktops, but needs to be disabled 
otherwise.

Groups are the more typical solution for multi-user access. I guess you 
could also use POSIX ACLs on device nodes - *shudder*.

Craig Ringer