ArsGeek

Adding new users to your Ubuntu install is a great way to get your friends and relatives into Linux. They’ll each be able to create a separate Ubuntu experience for themselves by customizing the look and feel of their desktops.

To add a new user, start by going to System-> Administration-> Users and Groups. This will bring up the user management windows. From here, click the New User button.

Next you’ll need to fill in some basic information about your new user, such as their user name, their real name and what kind of user they will be. Fiesty gives you three choices, Unprivileged, Desktop User and Administrator. The Unprivileged user has the ability to do just about nothing. The Desktop User can do anything but administer the system. Basically this means no sudo access. An Administrative user is given sudo access.

If you’d like to tweak your users a bit, say creating a new Desktop User but not allowing them to connect to the internet via a modem, you can do so in the User Privileges tab.

The advanced tab allows you to specify the user’s home directory, what shell they’ll use by default and what their UID number will be and what the user’s main group will be. Normally you’ll not need to worry about these.

From the Users and Groups window you can also manage groups. Groups are a handy way to assign permissions to a number of users or system processes. You could create a group called ‘family’ by clicking the New Group button and then adding all of your family users into this group. Once you create the new group, you’ll be given a list of users with check boxes next to them. Simply check off all the users you wish to be included in this group.

From this point on, if you create a folder that belongs to the family group, any user in that group will have access to it.

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