bug#20111: nice.1, renice.1 and nice.info : claims non-root user cannot decrease niceness

[Stéphane Aulery]

Hello,

I had you followed a bug reported by a Ubuntu user [1] about "nice value" 
change:

   According to "man nice" and "info coreutils nice", it is
   not possible for a non-root user to decrease the niceness
   of a process (even if they were the ones that increased the
   niceness). However this not the case in Ubuntu 9.04, as
   evidenced by the fact that the attached script "stopfirefox"
   can reduce the niceness back to 0 when firefox is unminimized.
   The manpage and infopage should be modified in light of this,
   and should also say where this was configured.

   According to
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_%28Unix%29#cite_note-0 This
   can be configured in /etc/security/limits.conf, however this
   does not seem to have any uncommented lines, so presumably
   Ubuntu configured this somewhere else.

   ProblemType: Bug
   Architecture: amd64

   DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
   NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
   PackageArchitecture: all
   ProcEnviron:
   SHELL=/bin/bash
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
   Uname: Linux 2.6.28-14-generic x86_64

I think that add a reference to talk about /etc/security/limits.conf is
a good idea.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/468518

Regards,

-- 
Stéphane Aulery

stopfirefox
Description: Text document