I recently installed Debian 7 and found the gui to manage users that was in previous versions has dissapeared (or I can't find it). I added users (for myself) but they have no shell and this creates a few problems.

Can someone point to the gui in Debian 7 and explain how to link these users to existing directories (previous versions refused to allocate an existing directory to a newly added user, I anticipate Debian 7 will do the same.)?

Thank you for your help.

Hi,
Do you know the name of that gui?
What method did you use? Normally I recommend "adduser" as this will give sane defaults including a shell and home directory.

What do you mean by "link users to existing directories"? Are you taking about home directories? If so you can use "usermod" to modify the account, but you may need to manually modify the ownership and/or permissions of the users home directory.

Example: set the shell of user bob, to /bin/bash
See the man page for details.

If you need more help please be more specific about the actual problem.

Cheers,

Evo2.

PS. You can also edit the passwd file, preferably by using vipw, but this can be a little dangerous unless you know what you are doing.

1 members found this post helpful.

What desktop environment are you using?

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your answers.

I use Gnome, I did not know about "usermod", that seems to have fixed the problem although the system still complains about (permissions of) iceauthority when trying to log in which happened on all Debian distros - a nuisance.

I still wish to know what happened to the GUI whose name I have no idea as it was only a matter of clicking it in the menu.

There is a Mepis User assistent that might be compatible with Debian, maybe?

I don't know for sure as Mepis is based on Debian Stable.

Might work. Might not.

ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ft.../m/mepis-user/

1 members found this post helpful.

About gnome user management gui, I found the answer in linuxquestions.org by googling - its the package "gnome-system-tools" which is not installed by default in Debian 7.

For those interested at lq: this answer did not appear in the "similar questions" when I first put my question.

Thank you all.

Hi,
If you can tell us the *exact* error message we can probably fix it.

Evo2.

+1 for CLI