Need a little help setting user permissions. Basically I'm gonna have multiple users using my Fedora box. How do I give users permissions to do certain things and not other things. For example, I want some users to be able to install a program and not be able to shutdown or restart the box. Also is there a way to keep them from browsing directories they are not supposed to? I'm assuming this is with the owner and group permissions, but not too sure how to work it out. Is there documentation on this somewhere on the net? Or does someone have some advice.

thanks

you can use chown and chrgrp to change ownership of files/directorys and use chmod to change permissions for example to stop users viewing a file/directory change group and owner to root then chmod 600 file
To allow certain users to view a file then change the group of the file to the same group that the users are in and chmod 660 file
man chmod, chgrp, chown for more detail

In contrast to windows security you can only set permissions for a file/directory to one group and one individual in linux.

But you can add users to multiple groups

so how would I restrict a user from say shutting down a machine or compiling?

Compiling you could probably do by changing permissions on compiler executables, dont really know of any better way to do it. edit your /etc/inittab to stop uses from pressing ctrl alt del to restart.

For what you describe the best thing to use is sudo.

Sudo is great because it allows you to give superuser privileges to some users for some commands and not for others.

So you could allow some users to do rpm -i .... but not halt or shutdown.