Today Joel Spolsky announced The resultsof the pollof whether ubuntu SEand unix SEwould be merged, they won’t. In short the Unix community was in favor of it but the Ubuntu community was not. Joel had this to say: So, Ubuntu, Linux, I get it, it’s clearly not the same thing. If you love Ubuntu, we have a site for you. If you love Linux and Unix, we have a site for you.

Most Unix users believe it’s impossible to add a group that was recently added to your user account without logging in and logging out. If you’re running X and need to give your gui new permissions (like dolphin/konqueoror) this may be true, for the most part. I don’t know how to change it for those processes. However, if you need to change it for a shell prompt it’s easy. You merely execute the command newgrp <newgroupname> in an open shell prompt and that prompt will now be loaded with the new group.