Changing main username/home/groups

Tom H tomh0665 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 8 20:05:00 UTC 2010


On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 7:58 PM, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have a lucid test partion on my laptop that I was using to test sound
> patches. Today I decided to do a network upgrade to maverick so that I
> can test the patches with that version.
>
> The machine name was 'lucidtest-laptop' and username/group was
> 'lucidtest'. To make things easier I decided to change to
> 'mavericktest-laptop' and 'mavericktest' respectively.  So I go hunting
> around to find an easy way to change the names and group and end up
> booting to Recovery mode & use root to:
>
> # usermod -l mavericktest -m -d /home/mavericktest lucidtest
> # groupmod -n lucidtest mavericktest
> # nano /etc/hosts
> (modify the host to reflect 'mavericktest-laptop')
> # nano /etc/hostname
> (ditto)
>
> So far so good. However when I logout & log back in GDM is still showing
> 'lucidtest' in the user box, but also shows 'mavericktest' in the black
> floating username box. I login & find that my home folder is
> appropriately renamed to 'mavericktest' and ownership (owner and group)
> is proper. However, the owner is showing 'mavericktest-lucidtest'. I
> also verify that my terminal prompt shows:
>
> $ mavericktest at mavericktest-laptop
>
> and then check System|Administration|Users and Groups and find that the
> user is showing lucidtest & mavericktest (the latter in faint grey below
> lucidtest). Now, I can't change that while logged in, so I try from
> Recovery|Root and still can't manage to get it right. I finally end up
> enabling Root, login to that and changing the username in
> 'System|Administration|Users and Groups', logout of Root, log in to
> mavericktest (it's showing correctly at the GDM login screen now), and
> kill the Root account. It's now installing the maverick dist upgrade.
>
> So here is my question; how should/could I have done all of this
> easily/properly & particularly what did I miss for the GDM login name issue?

A WAG: without root enabled, sulogin must be use sudo behind the
scenes, so I don't think that there is an alternative to enabling
root.

An alternative would have been to create mavericktest and delete lucidtest.




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