webbookblog

So you have your webbook set up and you can log on to it. But what about the rest of the family? Can they use it too? Of course they can, but we don’t want them logging on with your username and password, we don’t want them messing up your stuff!

From the menu at the top of the screen go to System-Administration-Users and Groups

and up pops the dialog below:

Note how most of the buttons are grey and inactive. This is because adding users is something that requires administrator privileges (also called root privileges). As you are the first user you do have these powers, but you have to press the “Unlock” button at the bottom to give yourself the extra privileges.

Whenever you see this screen you should remember the words of the great philosopher, Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility”

After you put in your password all the buttons will activate and you can press the “Add User” button and fill in the form below:

now a new problem becomes apparent, you can’t see the bottom of the form! This is because the form was designed for a screen measuring 1024×768 pixels, but your webbook has a screensize of 1024×600. Those last 168 pixels do make a bit of a difference sometimes. Your first instinct might be to grab the title bar with the mouse and pull it upwards, that helps a bit, but you can’t push the top of the window beyond the top of the screen that way, so I will have to show you a new trick. Hold down the Alt key on the keyboard, then click and drag anywhere on the window you want to move and you will find that your mouse cursor turns to a fist as you pick up the window and move it. This will allow you to move the window so that the title bar is off screen at the top, and you can see the buttons at the bottom.

There are a few places where you might encounter overly tall windows, another notable one is when setting up a new email account with Evolution so this is a good trick to get the hang of.

As you set up users for your family and friends, if you set their profile as “Desktop user” then they won’t be able to do anything that would damage the webbook or mess with the settings of your other users.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Howto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.