Arch Linux

chaosgeisterchen

Member

From: Kefermarkt, Upper Austria

Registered: 2006-11-20

Posts: 550

Managing users

Good morning

I turn out to be absolutely clueless, when it comes to manage the users of an Linux-based system, therefore I am still running my arch box under the root account, which is absolutely the wrong way to go and therefore I badly want to change it. As there is no other account created than the root account upon installing the system, I would love to be informed how to properly add an user, give it the proper rights (add it to groups it should belong to) and finally work with it.

I tried useradd and KDM already shows the new user, but I havent yet set password or home directory. Are these things created automatically upon first login. So what about the groups? How to manage them, so that I can add the new user to the administrator-group for granting it to execute su (which is necessary for su - afaik).

Thanks in advance for answers

cg

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celestary
Intel Core2Duo E6300 @ 1.86 GHz
kernel26
KDEmod current repository

dw

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2006-11-25

Posts: 160

Re: Managing users

Hi.

For adding users ->

adduser

(as root) and just answer the questions
For adding users to groups:

gpasswd -a <someuser> <somegroup>

as root. For example, type  gpasswd -a dw optical if i want to add the user "dw" to group "optical". You should add your user at least to the groups optical, audio and users.

Bernhard

Ps: Nice to see Users from Austria here

whompus

Member

From: Durham. UK

Registered: 2005-08-09

Posts: 256

Re: Managing users

The typical way of adding a user is like this

# useradd -m -s /bin/bash <user>
# passwd <user>

A password is required to activate the account.

For groups

# gpasswd -a <user> <group>

If group not available

# groupadd <groupname>

chaosgeisterchen

Member

From: Kefermarkt, Upper Austria

Registered: 2006-11-20

Posts: 550

Re: Managing users

User added to system and groups. How to allocate a password to the newly created user? I manually created /home/$username but it is still impossible to login with the new account.

P.S.: I quote you on that. Feels more like home.

EDIT

Thanks for the additional information. I will immediately test the instructions.

EDIT 2

Worked more or less flawlessly. I just had to readjust some permissions and now everything works.

Last edited by chaosgeisterchen (2007-02-21 12:27:21)

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celestary
Intel Core2Duo E6300 @ 1.86 GHz
kernel26
KDEmod current repository