How to add a new user in Ubuntu
Recommended Ubuntu book
You create your first user during the initial Ubuntu installation. This user has special privileges, such as create new users and performing a lot of administrative tasks. There is also a root user account which is the main administrative account and has pretty much all the priveleges the user can get. Now we can get a lower level of user with just basic privileges.
Adding new user in Ubuntu is pretty easy. There are two ways – using GUI and Terminal CLI.
Lets take a look at GUI first (just in case, GUI stands for Graphical User Interface). Go to System > Administration and pick Users and Groups menu option, it will prompt you for your main user password.
You are now in Users and Groups section. Now click “Add User”. Check out the “Advanced” options and “User Privileges”. Obviously, you would want to modify some privileges, such as “Connect to Internet”. Now press OK, get back to the previous screen that now lists the new user and press OK again. You have just created a new user and the new home folder for the user.
Try playing around in Users and Groups section. Create new groups and try placing users into different ones. This would allow users to share their files and folders, and you can set permissions on other folders in the system (will need to make another post on this) to use by certain groups.
Now lets create a user using a terminal window, open a Terminal and type:
sudo adduser newuser
or
sudo useradd -d /home/newuser -m newuser
where -d flag helps creating the home directory for the user and -m forces the directory creation. You can also specify the password right away with useradd function by using -p flag and typing password after it.
Also, you can just specify the password for the newuser as:
sudo passwd newuser
These commands are almost identical but adduser is a bit easier because it will prompt you for every piece of information after you press enter. Try it out.
