mjtickner Posted October 12, 2004 Report Share Posted October 12, 2004 Hi, I am setting up a computer for my parents using Mandrake 10.1 CE. They are fairly new to using computers. I am going to create separate users for my mum and dad. What I want to do is once I have set up one of the users for screen size, mouse behaviour, firefox extensions, menus, desktop items, etc, I want to copy the whole profile to the other user and then make a few small changes. Can I simply achieve this by copying the contents of /home/mum to /home/dad or are there other settings hidden elsewhere in the system that I will also have to duplicate? Mark Moved from Software forum to Terminal Shell Commands, Kernel and Programming by Artificial Intelligence Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted October 12, 2004 Report Share Posted October 12, 2004 nope that should more or less do it except remember you will need to change ownership of the files to the new user... chown -R newuser:newgroup /home/newuser Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted October 12, 2004 Report Share Posted October 12, 2004 Also, some badly-designed config-files store absolute paths or user names. So for example if you create /home/mum based on /home/dad, you'll have to [edit]# grep -ril "dad" /home/mum[/edit] and make needed changes. But all in all, it is feasible. I've done it. Only catch: Mozilla and company. Those store the profile in ~/.mozilla/ah7gq6dsfq76/profile (or some strange path like that). Only the ah7gq6dsfq76 somehow has to change for each home directory (???). So you may have to launch mum's mozilla once, and then copy the dad's profile's subdirectories to mum's profile. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred_the_fish Posted October 12, 2004 Report Share Posted October 12, 2004 Would it not be easier to setup one user, and then clone the profile when you setup another? Inwhich case, investigate useradd (run from root). There is a flag option for it that will enable you to clone (use man useradd to get the options). Other wise this is the Fedora graphical howto, mandrake would be much the same Whilst your at it, if you both set them to a "users" group, then they should be able to share documents, but I guess that is up to you.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjtickner Posted October 18, 2004 Author Report Share Posted October 18, 2004 (edited) Thanks for this. I tried it on my normal machine to clone one of my accounts using: useradd -m -k source-directory new-user It works with the exception that Mozilla seems to get a little confused. I guess that means build up the basic desktop first and then clone it before configuring Mozilla. Then I guess the trick is to configure one Mozilla and then copy the Mozilla profile in by hand over the top of the automatically generated one for the other user. I don't want to really be installing two lots of Firefox extensions and themes if I can help it ;) I guess there might be a shortcut using the Firefox profile manager - but that isn't relevant to this (apart from if I was really keen I could script the whole process) Mark I'll take that the problem is solved and mark the thread solved - Artificial Intelligence Edited October 23, 2004 by Artificial Intelligence Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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