Resource sharing for two users logged in locally simultaneously

[Matthias Saou]

Hi,

Here's the one big feature I'd like to have in Fedora for my current
needs : The possibility to have everything "just work" when more than
one user is logged into X (from gdm).

The need : Me and my girlfriend share the same PC at home for various
things, and we both have our own users in order to keep settings
separate (mainly useful for WM settings, program preferences, UI
language). We don't have the habit of logging out since we never
know which one of us will be the next to use the computer, so... the
easiest is to have two gdm screens and let us both log in, especially
since gdm allows that to be trivially configured!

The problem : On FC4, changing /etc/security/console.perms* files in
order to have group write access on various devices, for a group we
both belonged to, worked out quite well. Sound was then OK, CDs/DVDs
too... quite alright.
On FC5, things got more complicated and I still wasn't able to get
everything working as on FC4. For USB drives for instance, now that
hotplug and udev seem to handle that, they get mounted, but although
both users can see them, only one has write access to it, and it
seems to be randomly one or the other. I wasn't even able to find how to
change/fix that...

So what I'd like would be for development to try and "clean up" the way
console permissions are handled since it seems to be going in all
directions currently, simplify everything and take into account at
least these two common cases :
- Some devices should always be writable by a given group. Useful for
instance when logging in through ssh to remotely play music, which
requires write access to the sound devices.
- Some devices should always be available to all users logged in
locally (the case I described above).

Is this possible, would it be hard to do?

Matthias

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