Paul Johnson:
One option is to add users one by one to the fuse group in /etc/group. But I don't have time to do that, and there are hundreds of users.
Tim:
Scripting to automate changing membership? You'd probably, also, want to script the user-adding routine for the future, to add new users to the groups you use on your system.
Paul Johnson:
You are making this way too hard. Even if I could figure it out, I could never teach a part time lab assistant. I can't create an ever more complicated chain of tools and scripts for things like this because at some point an ordinary human will have to administer these systems, possibly adding users with a Fedora tool like system-config-users.
I would imagine that there's a way to specify default groups to be added to. And I'm fairly certain that someone would have made a way to easily modify batches of existing users. There are some tools around for systems configuration, darned if I can recall the name of one of them at the moment, other than something beginning with "s". No, I don't mean something like system-config-whatever, there's a third-party package. Sab... sat... I can't remember.
Maybe start with a search query like: http://www.google.com.au/search?&q=remote+admin+of+a+group+of+fedora +linux+computers
Webmin might be worth looking at, but I haven't used it for years.
Is Fedora supposed to be a desktop distribution for users or not?
A lab of computers isn't exactly a default condition. Most networks, whether Fedora or otherwise, would probably need some customisation. At least with Linux, you *can* customise such things to your heart's content. If labs setting up computers don't have a competent administrator for it, that's where the real problem lay.
How in the HELL do the people who put fuse into the distribution expect "ordinary" people to use it? I refuse to believe the makers of the program expect it to be such a massive pain in the ass.
But, then again, I'm often surprised. I still can't get over the difficulty of mounting drives when not root.
I haven't played with Fuse, but I can well understand why non-root users shouldn't be allowed to mount drives by *default*. It does make it all too easy for a malcontent to introduce something unwanted, or steal files. Of course, you are allowed to change the defaults.