Account Capabilities Greyed Out?

[cptClassLoader]

My brand new 12" PowerBook G4 running Jaguar 10.2.3 seems to have some odd security settings that I don't seem to have found any obvious way to change. The symptoms are as follows:

* I can't change the icons on the Dock.

* The Capabilities button on the Account Preferences window is greyed out.


Things I've tried to fix this:

* Activated the root account - The Dock for that account is locked as well, and Capabilities is not accessible.

* Created a brand new dummy user, to see if it was a problem with the permissions on my account. The dummy account's Dock was locked on initial login, and his Capabilities were not modifiable.

* Booted the PB from the OS-X DVD and ran the Privilege Repair module of Disk Utility against the boot drive. It reported (and fixed) a handful of problems, but this didn't change the behavior of the Dock, or of the Capabilities button.

My account is in the groups admin and root, so I know that that's not a problem.

The workaround for the Dock problem was to simply hack the com.apple.dock.plist file directly to make the changes to the Dock. This leaves the Dock still locked, but at least it contains my desired configuration. I suspect there's a "Master switch" somewhere that needs to be thrown to turn Capabilities on. Anyone know where that might be, or have any suggestions for fixing this problem? Would the 10.2.6 upgrade help?

Thanks;

--Mark

 

[DeltaMac]

Looks like you have the wrong idea about capabilities. The capabilities button allows you as an Admin user to decrease the capabilities of a non-admin user, you can adjust to fewer capabilities, mostly to keep a user from accessing/changing your choice of files/programs, thus changing the capabilities for a simple user. You can get this option by creating a non-admin user, and changing capabilities for that user. As for your Dock, I would delete that 'com.apple.dock.plist' file, and use a utility such as Cocktail or Maintain, that allows you to delete the System cache files, immediately reboot, on restart, your dock problems should be fixed.