Change main User ID while applications running

[young_matthewd]

Changed user ID from default 500 to another value using the linuxconf utility. After propagating the change the currently running application at the time of the ID change did not response (i.e Gnome toolbars, window management, etc). Killed the startx process and logged on again but similar situation. Now it seems certain xinit information is lost. The normal Gnome window toolbars are totatly missing. Nothing comes up but a terminal window plus two other applications which I was using at the time of the ID change. So I set the user ID back but the problem remained. Hunted for any files with the non-default ID and did a change own but no luck. Forced to run startx as root and rerun the Gnome desktop initialization. Things work fine but I am logged on as root. Anybody know how to alter the ID but not wipe out Gnome Desktop settings? - Matthew

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Matthew Young

[furrycat]

I'm not sure exactly what's happening here because I don't use linuxconf but if I had to guess I'd say that when you changed the uid, linuxconf ran a chown in your home directory so all your files were still owned by you, albeit under a different uid.

However you can't change the uid of a program that's running. Your existing gnome apps would have been unable to use the current configs because they were running as the old uid. Then you killed X, which was bad. Somewhere along the line an app probably got as far as creating a new config file but crashed before it could write it out properly.

It may be something different but that sounds plausible to me. In any case, you won't be changing your uid while you're logged in and working in the future...