GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 304849
Should be able to create users in gdmsetup.
Last modified: 2013-12-17 18:34:31 UTC
I've tried to set up some linuxworkstations in libraries, etc. It would be really nice if there was a "create new account" at the gdm-login prompt. It should be disabled by default and allow people to directly create a new account and login. A suboption could be to have just "login" bottum, which would log people into a freshly created account. This would be neat in order to ensure that the privacy of the people using these public-available computers is respected. Deletion of the account afterwards is quite easy to script, so there is no need for that to be a part of the loginsystem.
I don't think this would be a reasonable feature to add to the login greeter, but would be a reasonable thing to add to gdmsetup. You should require root password to create an account and gdmsetup can only be run after entering the root password. I'd accept a patch to add this to gdmsetup. However, adding this to gdmsetup wouldn't really give you the feature you are asking for. What you really want is to create a PAM module that instead of requesting username and password, creates a user on-the-fly (or grabs a pre-created user out of a userpool). I can help you understand how to write such a PAM module if you need help. This would be a much cleaner solution than hacking gdm2 to avoid authenticating the user. I would accept such a custom PAM module into the gdm2 CVS code to be used by other people with similar needs.
I'm not sure that a pam-module can do what I want, but that can be that I just don't know the excact capabillities of pam. The particular system I'd like to have would have a greeter saying: 1) Please login (as of today) 2) Create new login (prompts user for username/password to be set at the new account). 3) Quick login (creates new account one the fly, could be viewed as a one-time-account). Would this be possible with pam? Thanks.
Yes, you can do this with PAM. There are plenty of guides out there that explain how PAM works and how to write a PAM module. I'd use google to find out how to do what you want. You might also want to send an email to gdk@sunsite.dk (the GDM mail alias) and see if anybody else on the list has suggestions of the best way to do what you want. Perhaps someone else already has some PAM code they will share with you.
The gnome-about-me applet (in gnome-applets) does this. If somebody wanted to port the code to also work in GDM, I'd accpe the patch.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 334186 ***
re-opening bug since all the other issues in bug #334186 (which this bug was marked as a duplicate) have been fixed except for this issue.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.
This bug still applies to gdm3. Please don't automatically close bugs before verifying that they no longer apply.
let's lump this with the "guest account" bug and just make sure that when we have guest accounts there's a way to promote them to full users. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 619526 ***
(In reply to comment #9) > let's lump this with the "guest account" bug and just make sure that when we > have guest accounts there's a way to promote them to full users. > > *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 619526 *** That doesn't fit with one of the common use cases for this bug. I don't want to allow guest accounts on my systems, but I do want an authenticated way to create new users at login time, to avoid having to log in as another user and "sudo adduser".
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think we're going to add that feature. There has been talk before about adding a special "admin console" mode to gnome, so if a user logs in as root, it brings them to an administration panel instead of a user login. I think that's the closest we'd ever get this. This bug has been open since 2005, and I'd like to close it out.
(In reply to comment #11) > I understand what you're saying, but I don't think we're going to add that > feature. There has been talk before about adding a special "admin console" mode > to gnome, so if a user logs in as root, it brings them to an administration > panel instead of a user login. I think that's the closest we'd ever get this. > > This bug has been open since 2005, and I'd like to close it out. I'm not sure that would address the use case of new user setup after a fresh install. How would you feel about special-casing that particular case: if there are *no* users, create a workflow for the user to fix that as root? Separately from that, the "not listed" option could then suggest that the user log in as root or an administrator if they need to create a new user.
Note these days GDM checks if there are no users on the system and then runs gnome-initial-setup (which is a wizard that walks through creating an initial user).