A forum user (see http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6775934.html) has noted that the GNOME Configuration HOWTO tells the user to "gpasswd -a yourregularuser plugdev", but since the deprecation of hal, the plugdev group is not guaranteed to exist. The plugdev group will be created by networkmanager (current gx86 versions), bluez, and libgphoto2, but users who do not have these packages installed will not have the group, will get confused by the error message, and may try to do strange things to create it (such as installing hal). On the other hand, if the plugdev group *does* exist, the user should still add himself to it - otherwise he won't be able to use networkmanager or bluetooth! So this part of the gnome howto could do with a bit of improvement.
udev-related stuff creates the group, so it's still needed.
(In reply to comment #1) > udev-related stuff creates the group, so it's still needed. Grepping gx86 for "enewgroup plugdev" reveals the following packages: app-pda/usbmuxd; media-libs/libgphoto2; media-libs/libmtp; net-misc/networkmanager; net-wireless/bluez; net-wireless/gnome-bluetooth; sys-apps/hal; sys-apps/uam; sys-apps/pmount. A new gnome-2.32 user is not guaranteed to have any of these installed. He might, or he might not. Maybe the plugdev group has already been created, or maybe not. What should the user do if he had just installed gnome, the plugdev group does not exist, and the gpasswd command fails? Please don't mark this bug fixed until the documentation provides the user with an answer to that question.
This has been fixed in CVS, so should show up on the site in an hour or so. Thanks for reporting!
