After my post on modifying default user settings in Vista I thought I should follow up with how to accomplish a similar thing in OSX. For OSX there is only one way to accomplish this, and that way is the manual way.

Just like with the manual way in Vista set up two user accounts, your local admin and a template user. Change all the settings you want for the template user and then restart and log in as admin. To copy the files to the default user you will need to open the terminal and follow the commands below.

Local admin isn’t enough, you will need to actually be using the terminal as the root user. If you don’t have root enabled you can find out how to enable it here.

sudo su

The English.lproj is the default user directory for any user that uses the English language. All we are doing here is copying the English.lproj folder and its contents to English.lproj.bak. For these important files ditto is better than cp because ditto will preserve the “resource fork” using the –rsrc option. It is also a good idea to keep a copy of this default user somewhere else besides just this computer in case something happens. I would recommend zipping up the English.lproj folder and storing it on a backup drive somewhere.

cd /System/Library/User Template/
ditto –rsrc English.lproj/* English.lproj.bak

Now that we copied a backup we can remove all the files/settings in the old English.lporj directory. If you accidentally delete the English.lproj folder (instead of just its contents) you can create it again with mkdir.

rm -rf English.lproj/*

Here we are just copying everything from our user we set up to the user template folder. Replace “rothgar” in the below command with the username you gave your template user.

cp -R /Users/rothgar/* English.lproj/

This final step will change the owner and group of the files and folders inside the user template to what they should be. All of the default user files should be owned by root and the group wheel.

chown -Rv root:wheel English.lproj

Those are all the steps needed to modify the default user. It would also be a good idea to reboot the computer, log in as admin, and check/repair disk permissions on the drive just to make sure everything is correct before you take an image of the computer. If everything is correct you can test out your settings with a new user and if everything checks out delete your template user.

Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or problems with the process in the comments.