2012-04-22

Who is user jetty and why does he have an account on my machine?

As some people can tell, I have installed Fedora 17 on one of my systems at home.

The work laptop (a very nice IBM thinkpad T500) is about dead due to a TSA checkup from last FUDcon and has never been able to handle any of the GNOME-3 updates (I tried Fedora 15 and 16 for a short while but the system would auto-shutdown from heat overload after a bit.)

I had gotten an ASUS laptop for the Christmas of 2010 which had been used to deal with various "Windows" software that was needed for our neighborhood association and for me to play around with Cygwin. I finally decided I had done enough of that for a while, and it was time to play around with Fedora on it to see if how it would run. I had also tried Fedora 15 and Fedora 16 LIVE on the system, but had found it rather flakey in its graphics.. After reading Adam Jacksons and others updates to the X server I figured I should give 17 a go.

Install Trial #1. Since I have to keep the Windows side until my time on the association board is over.. I decided to resize the Windows partitions to fit Fedora on it. I had read that Fedora could do this but found out that this feature was no longer available, or that something with the laptops Windows 7 NTFS was not recognizable. Never fear,  ask.fedoraproject.org had the answer I needed: reboot into Windows and use its built in tools.

Install Trial #2. Install the Beta from the DVD. The install went very well though I wish some of the pages could have been replaced with the ones that will show up in Fedora 18. I went through and customized the packages I had installed so that I would get my evil vice: emacs. Laptop rebooted and firstboot got all my information ready for me. Login showed up and there was user jetty (well actually I missed it at first, but realized it when I could not log in with my password.)

Finally log in as smooge, and tada! Look I have a GNOME3 desktop. System seems pretty zippy and windows are much smoother on this system than when I had used the LIVE images (either on USB or Cdrom).

So who is Jetty? The jetty user comes from my choosing eclipse to install. jetty is a java server that the eclipse-platform package requires. I am guessing there is a packaging bug somewhere that is causing the "user" to show up as a possible login. The reason is

jetty:x:995:992::/usr/share/jetty:/bin/sh

A quick bugzilla 815177 and we have done our minimal testing duty. Now to start learning how to use the Fedora 17 desktop as a new Fedoran would.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"I had read that Fedora could do this but found out that this feature was no longer available, or that something with the laptops Windows 7 NTFS was not recognizable."

It's just a Beta bug: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F17_bugs#ntfs-resize-fail