The Shell Game

The capital letter in my user name was indeed throwing sendmail into fits. I could have created an entire new user. But hey, that’s a lot of work. I’d have to port my Firefox profile over and re-customize my desktop. Nah. Definitely not worth it just to be able to read local email.

I could have directly edited /etc/passwd using vipw at the command line. I’m not a big fan of vi. It scares the pants off me. I’ll stick to emacs, thanks. Heck, I find emacs extremely challenging on a good day. I’m all for the simple route of using kedit. So on the advice of mweltin who was hanging around #boinc, I ended up using usermod from the command line. The syntax was quite simple. usermod -l kathryn Kathryn. The only gotcha is that you can’t be logged into an account that you want to edit. So I logged out of Kathryn. Hmmm… well that dumped me to a text login screen. Oh well. I logged in as root, ran my usermod command and then rebooted from the command line. I have no idea how to get back into a graphical environment from a text prompt. But at least I learned how to reboot from the command line.

And…. BINGO!

[kathryn@Galaxy ~]$ mail
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93. Type ? for help.
“/var/spool/mail/kathryn”: 6 messages 6 new
>N 1 boinc@Galaxy.Fedora Mon Feb 11 19:42 17/582 “test”
N 2 MAILER-DAEMON@Galaxy Mon Feb 11 19:42 78/2716 “Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours”
N 3 MAILER-DAEMON@Galaxy Mon Feb 11 19:42 164/5257 “Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours”
N 4 root@Galaxy.Fedora Mon Feb 11 19:42 27/978 “Cron <root@Galaxy> run-parts /etc/cron.daily”
N 5 logwatch@Galaxy.Fedo Mon Feb 11 19:42 113/3519 “Logwatch for galaxy.fedora (Linux)”