Can't edit groups (freeze and "permission denied" error)

Thanks for the report. I think there are several different issues at stake here.

First, when creating an user, its main group is creating under the hood by adduser, and we don't show it until the tool is restarted. This is a known problem, but it's not easy to fix properly, at least in a stable release. But this shouldn't be a major bug: why would you need to edit the user's main group right after creating it?

Second, groups creation seems to fail *for any group* in Lucid. But the error I get is about permissions, not "Unknown error". Could you check that it's the case on your machine? This bug seems to be fixed in the current upstream version, though.

Yes, you are right, it is two different errors:
On creation of a group I get a permission error.
On adding members to a pre-existing group I get an unknown error.

But in both cases I get this temporary freeze prior to the error message.

Oh, I think I understand where the second issue comes from. Could you apply the attached patch and retry? Save the file, and then run:
sudo patch /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends.service < PATH_TO_SAVED_FILE
(You'll need to restart your computer after that for the changes to take effect.)

This patch is already applied in a more recent upstream release.

The patch failed because my org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends.service is almost empty. This is the full file contents:

[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends
Exec=/usr/sbin/system-tools-backends
User=root

That's all, end of file, and none of the other files in the directory looks even remotely similar to the patch. Did the last dist-upgrade one hour ago. I'am using the netbook remix, is it that different from the desktop edition?

No, it's just that I should have told you to patch the file /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends.conf. :D

That's it! Now it works fine. No freeze anymore.

But still: If I add a new user, I would expect the tool to add a group of the same name and set this as the main group for the new user as it happens with the initial default user on system installation.

Cool. For the main group problem: the group is automatically created, it's just that it's not shown right after adding it. Do you have a precise reason to immediately go to the groups dialog and try to edit this group? Fixing that bug currently requires a few hacks that I'm not sure I can commit now that we're close to the release. So better be sure it's worth the risk.

Usually I prefer to use a simple "useradd -m", it was the first time ever I tried the GUI for this simple task. And I checked the group properties just to be sure that everything is fine. I did not realise that the group is actually created, so I tried to do it by hand. Call it a misunderstanding by an unexperienced GUI user ;-)

I think it is important to get the patch for the freeze fix into lucid, but the other point is not really urgent, time to fix it for the next release 10.10. Thank you for your quick replies!

OK, that's the more likely scenario - sometimes knowing more leads to more problems... ;-)

Could you open a new report about the main group problem? I'll see if I can put together a not-so-ugly patch before 2.30 is released. But I consider this bug as fixed for the first error.

Package was uploaded to Lucid a long time ago.