Installing the resource manager In order to use the resource manager, all you need to do is add the pam_resmgr module to your PAM files, and adjust the access control lists in /etc/resmgr.conf. When adding pam_resmgr to "local" login facilities such as XDM, it makes sense to give all users access to certain resource classes, e.g. a resource class named "desktop" that includes all devices a typical desktop user may need. To do so, use the following line session optional pam_resmgr.so grant=desktop If you want to support X terminals, you may want to limit access to desktop devices only to the local X session, but not give any access to remote X terminals. To do so, remove the "grant=desktop" statement and use the following access control rule in /etc/resmgr.conf: allow desktop tty=:0 You can also add resmgr support to SSH sessions by editing /etc/pam.d/ssh, and adding the following line: session optional pam_resmgr.so fake_ttyname Again, there's probably no point in giving all users logging in via ssh access to any devices by default. However, it may be useful to grant specific users access to certains classes of devices. For instance, the following gives user "kf" access to the scanner device: class scanners add /dev/scanner scanners allow scanners user=kf