Easy way/script to add another user like me?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday, 24 February 2006 16:53, Tommy Trussell wrote:
> On 2/23/06, William Grant <tanarrifujitsu at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> > > On *nix we do things like that on the command line. To
> > > give my son (username connor) membership to the same groups as
> > > me (username alan) I do this:
> > >
> > > sudo for i in `groups alan` ; do gpasswd -a connor $i ; done
>
> ...
>
> > Yes, I know that you just have to add them to the groups.
> > However, many people will prefer to not use the command line! It
> > may be more efficient and powerful to use the CLI, but it is more
> > cryptic and harder to remember for people that don't know what
> > they are doing.
>
> It might be safest to add a "clone attributes to new user" command,
> but copy and paste might be interesting. Here is the idea -- from
> within the Users dialog, allow the operator to copy the user
> attributes to the clipboard and paste them to another user. I'm
> sure there are some potential problems with this -- for example you
> might or might not want the person added to another user's personal
> group. But what if the information went onto the clipboard in a
> "human readable" format suitable for pasting into an email message
> or whatever?
>
> Actually, it might be VERY interesting to be able to copy and paste
> attributes within any of the GUI dialogs. Imagine how much easier
> it might be to assist a user having trouble with Internet settings
> if you could ask them to copy and paste them into an email, and
> they come out in a readable form that you could correct and ask
> them to paste back into the GUI.
>
> But now I'm dreaming...

nonononono you really do not want to do that. Windows tried this stunt 
with COM/OLE and all it's progeny. Look where that got them. From an 
engineering point of view, this is a fundamentally broken thing to 
attempt.

To implement it requires an API change at a very basic level. All apps 
now have to be "intelligent clipboard"-aware and receive an event to 
copy their data to a clipboard, which has to accept certain 
parameters to define what data is requested, and the clipboard has to 
know something about every app to be able to offer intelligent 
choices to the user as to what must be copied... horrible, horrible, 
horrible.

And what about users who don't use gnome?

The gnome developers are onto a good thing with how they develop their 
system. The GUI is for *user* tasks and common predictable system 
tasks. For anything else, we have this wonderful tool that has been 
around for 37 years called the shell. It's not elitism - there's a 
certain minimum amount of expertise and knowledge required to perform 
system tasks, and doing them through a shell effectively separates 
those who may do it from those who have no business being near that 
stuff. 

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20060224/25573caf/attachment.sig>