Debian

Hello,
I need to run an application in wine that requires write permission to a USB device. Wine users must not have root privileges. On FreeBSD this could be accomplished by adding the user to the wheel group but I am using Debian 6.0. From looking at the passwd file it is not obvious what group to use. How can an ordinary user be given write access to USB devices?

I think 'plugdev' .

On Debian, pmount is the program that uses the plugdev group. I installed pmount. This program allows users to manually mount storage devices. Unfortunately, this is not what I need to do and Debian already has some daemon that automatically does this.

I am trying to use a logic device programmer which has a USB connection with wine running the Windows application program. Debian automatically mounts the USB device ok but the application program doesn't have write permission to use it.

Unfortunately I have not access to any Debian system now. On Ubuntu (11.04) if you add an user to the group 'plugdev' this user has read/write permission for a USB flash memory devices (without need for any pmount or other commands).

Here is some information: DebianDesktopHowTo - Debian Wiki Maybe it can help.

Hi Yazu,

The link you supplied is interesting. I need to study it more to see if it solves my problem. I am still not sure what group to use. The plugdev group is the only one that mentions USB but according to the pmount man page it is for storage devices. It tries to figure out a filesystem type. The logic programmer does not use a filesystem. It has an embedded controller that needs to connect directly to the application program.

Thanks for the help.
Best regards,
Fred

What is the device name when it is plugged in? What does 'ls -l /dev/foo' show as the group? You might want to look into udev rules assigning file permissions. First Google hit gave me this: Writing udev rules

Hi neutronscott,

It looks like udev is what I need. Thanks!

Best regards,
Fred