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TIPS: Create a Custom Environment for Leopard's New Guest User

TIPS At your place of employment, do you have an Apple computer setup for visiting clients to use? When they leave there are often personal documents left on the desktop, iChat is logged in under their user name, and after a few weeks, that user is a real mess!

Fortunately, with Mac OS X 10.5 there is a new user called Guest. It requires no password to login and when you logout the entire contents of the Users' Home folder are deleted. The next time someone logs in as Guest an entirely new Home folder is created.

This is great, but the default setup is little generic! This tutorial will show you how to customize the Guest user and permanently save the settings. In my case, I changed the desktop picture to one featuring a company logo and rebuilt the Dock with the applications my clients need most often...

11-05-07_Guest-Old.png
Before/After



Before attempting this tutorial, you should be familiar with the Terminal.app. While I feel the instructions are clear enough so that my Mom could do it, your comfort level may be different!

The changes we will make not only affect the Guest Account, but any additional new users created on this machine. For most people, this isn't a concern, but you need to be aware of this before continuing.

Let's start by opening the System Preferences and selecting the Accounts icon. In the lower left, click the padlock icon and authorize to make changes. Select the Guest Account icon and check the box: "Allow Guests to log into this computer".

11-08-07_Guest_Login.png

Log out of your main user and then login as the Guest User. At this point you can customize to your heart's content.

Here are some reminders of things to check:
  • Run through all the System Preferences and tweak as necessary.
  • Copy any new desktops into the Pictures folder.
  • Rebuild the Dock with the applications and folders you think will be most helpful to your clients.
  • Launch all the Dock applications at least once. Many of them will have tasks they need to complete on first launch. For example, Microsoft Word installs fonts, Firefox loads the 'What's New" page.
  • In the browsers, create some helpful industry bookmarks and set the default Home page to your company web site. ;-)
Once you have finished customizing, launch the Terminal.app (it's in the /Applications/Utilities folder). When entering the commands listed below, please, pretty please, be very careful to watch for typos. Feel free to cut/paste.

The Guest user is the low-man on the totem-pole. He doesn' t have permission to change anything outside his Home folder, so first you need to switch users to your normal user admin account. In my case that would be coyle.

In the terminal type what's in bold after the prompt ($): su {your admin name} and then your password. Now the Terminal thinks you're an admin user, but you still don't all the permissions you need , so type: sudo -s. The password is the same one from your normal admin user login. Your terminal should look similar to the box below.

Guest$ su coyle
Password: XXXXXX

bash-3.2$ sudo -s
Password: XXXXXXX



Just in case, let's make a backup of the User Template before we change anything. (Restore instructions are at the end of this article.)


$ cd /System/Library
$ tar cfz UserTemplateBackup.tar.gz "User Template"
$ cd /Users/Guest


You are now ready to copy the new Guest folders to the template location. Did you change any Finder window settings, such as icon size or grid? Then we need to copy the hidden .DS_Store file. In the terminal type after the prompt:


$ cd /Users/Guest
$ cp .DS_Store "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/.DS_Store"




If you added a custom desktop picture to the Pictures folder we will need to copy that folder. The first terminal command deletes the original Pictures template folder. The second line copies the new folder from the Guest user.


$ rm -R "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Pictures"/
$ cp -R Pictures/ "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Pictures"/



All the other changes you made: the Dock, System Preferences, etc, are in the Library folder. That gets copied to the User Template folder with the following two commands. (Similar to Pictures, first we delete the template and then copy the new one.)


$ rm -R "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Library"/
$ cp -R Library/ "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Library"/


Unless you added files to the other Guest home folders, for example: Documents, Music, Public, etc, you're done! Otherwise, adapt the two terminal lines above to delete the originals and copy the replacements.

The next time you log into the Guest Account, you will see all the custom settings.


My new Guest Account desktop. Click for a larger image.
11-05-07_Guest-New.png





Did something go wrong? To restore from your backup, type the following in the terminal:


$ cd /System/Library/
$ rm -Rf "User Template"/
$ tar xfz UserTemplateBackup.tar.gz


If you have any questions, please contact me.

Posted on Thursday, November 08 @ 21:34:59 MST by coyle
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