Red Hat Diaries/0036

Trouble!

Syd may not be the computer savvy person that I am, but she is by no means dumb. Far from it. And yet, eight days into her love affair with iBook, she ran into trouble, and tonight, on day 9, she confided, before turning in early after a hard day's work, that she is feeling frustrated. Things should be easy, she tells me, but she can't find out how to do them. She is philosophical about it, saying that it takes time and patience, and that things have to be just as easy on the Mac.

Syd's trouble began when last night she attempted to delete a very dumb AOL install application from her hard drive. She dragged it to the trash can but nothing happened. She selected it in the Finder and then hit Cmd-Delete and still nothing happened. Finally, she held down Ctrl and clicked on it, and from the context menu chose Move to Trash - and still nothing happened. She turned to me.

I looked at the file and noticed it was owned by root. This is something which is proving increasingly annoying to Mac users: application installs most often require administrator privileges, and then install everything as owned by root - which is higher. So without enabling her root account and attacking the file as root, there was no way Syd was going to be able to delete AOL from her hard drive.

This time we took the 'official' route to using root, as described in the 'missing manual' book for X. First, go into NetInfo Manager and enable the root account. Then go into Login preferences and choose to display 'Other Users' at system startup.

But to enable the root account Syd had to submit her administrator password, and every time she submitted this password, NetInfo Manager knocked her back out again. So she went into KeyChain Access and verified that she was typing her password correctly. She was. So she went back to NetInfo Manager again, but NetInfo Manager wouldn't have any of it.

Then we tried Tom Liston's trick: go to a console and use the command

sudo passwd root

But even that wouldn't work. And by now, both Syd and I were becoming increasingly frustrated. On a hunch I told her to find the application which let her change her password, and to submit the same password again as her new password. She did it, went back to NetInfo Manager, and now it worked - NetInfo Manager let her in.

By this time we'd also succeeded in getting the console to let her up to root, and so she had already navigated down to the AOL program and deleted it. But still the same, the behaviour of the system indicated that it kept multiple copies of user passwords strewn all over the place, and that certain areas of the system had already become corrupt after eight days of rather cautious use. Not a good verdict at all.

But wait - for the fun has just begun: Today was my day to experience trouble with the Mac, and my trouble was not limited to a wimpy AOL install file. Click the link below to learn more and participate in the unique sadistic joy.

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