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How-to Modify the Default User Settings in OSX

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.

Enable “path view” on top of Finder window

I saw this at The Unofficial Apple Weblog and thought it was nice because I hate that you can’t see what folder you are in by default.
Open a terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

And you have your location at the top of the window. I don’t even have a Apple anymore but this still may be useful in the future. Only works in OSX 10.5.5+

Create user template in OSX

After my last post I realized I have never explained (or documented for myself) how to create a user template in OSX. The best how-to I found was on Jim Epler’s Blog which I found via google. Here are his steps slightly modified

1. Tweak your default account including setting dock, clearing cache, recent items, etc.

2. Restart and login to the machine as admin.

3. Issue the following commands in the terminal:

:~root# cd /System/Library/User\ Template/
:~root# sudo ditto -rsrcFork English.lproj/* English.lproj.bak
:~root# sudo rm -rf /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/*
:~root# sudo cp -R /Users//* /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/
:~root# sudo chown -R root English.lproj
:~root# sudo chgrp -R wheel English.lproj

4. Restart, log in as admin and repair permissions before creating a new account to see if it worked.

Now all your new users that log into the machine (including mobile users) will have these same settings as your template user.

OSX 10.5 keychain and user templates

We decided to have our Apple computers joined to our Active Directory server so we have a little more control and our users have a little more continuity and features when using different machines. We also finally figured out how to set up a user template similar to Windows default user profile. A problem we ended up with was our user template had a blank password for the keychain access but we need our users to have their keychain password be the same as their login password. If the keychain passwords do not match, the keychain keeps popping up every time they need to use a password stored in the keychain.
To fix this you can simply delete the login.keychain file from the /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/keychains/ folder before a user logs in or you can just deleted the login.keychain from the /User//Library/keychains/ folder after the user has already logged in.
I just wanted to help with this problem before too many people got stuck with this like we did.
Leave me a comment if it worked for you or if you have any problems.

How to restore a Apple computer to factory defaults

I occasionally need to set up a Apple computer to act like it just came from the factory to give to a new person or to sell it. There are 2 ways I found to do this. The first is with the original install disk that came with your computer. But honestly who still has those around?

The second is as easy as deleting one folder and two files.

All you have to do is boot the mac into single user mode (command+s at start up) and enter the following commands at the terminal you are presented with.

mount -uw /
rm -rf /Users/ /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
reboot (or shutdown -h now if you don't want the machine to turn back on)
Replace with whatever username you set up on the computer.

This isn’t exactly the same as a fresh install but it is close enough. It removes all of the users and has the person go through the steps of naming the computer and registering with Apple.

Let me know if you have any other tips for restoring a Apple computer to true factory defaults.

Catching up

I have had quite a few articles and tools that I have been wanting to post here but I haven’t made the time to do it. So I guess I am just going to make one big post for all of them. Most of these tools came from the wonderful How-to Geek but there are a few other good ones in the mix.

First up is replacing your task manager with process explorer in Windows Vista. In XP it is usually as simple as going to options and clicking on replace task manager. In Vista there is a bit more of a trick to it if you still have UAC ruling your life. UAC is the first thing I turn off in Vista so there wasn’t any problem for me. Head over to the How-to Geek for further instructions and screenshots.

The next tip is all about drivers. First you could always see what drivers you have installed at the command line, but that isn’t very fun. I guess you could see what drivers are installed and export the list to a text document, excel spreadsheet, or something else. Or you could just transfer the drivers directly from one machine to another. This is great news if you are moving from one computer to another, or if you are just having problems with your computer and want to do some troubleshooting.

Downloadsquad makes the list of useful tools with the Revo Uninstaller. I have never heard of it before but already really like it. Not only can it uninstall your programs and search for left over files and registry entry’s, but it also has built in shortcuts like the on screen keyboard, msconfig, system properties, etc. And because the new version is free AND portable I can keep it on my usb key and take it with me when troubleshooting machines.

Downloadsquad also showed me a Universal Extractor that could be very useful for extracting files that 7-zip can’t already open. I haven’t tried it yet but I defiantly want to keep it in my bag of tricks.

You would think this post would be done now because there is already so much stuff. But I have been procrastinating for a while now on these tools.

Inventgeek had one of the best do-it-yourself articles I have sen for a while. How to make your own thermal paste from diamond dust. I really want to give this one a try on my PS3 but it is going to have to wait just a little bit. I am still a bit nervous about putting it back together. The opening up doesn’t scare me at all. It is only the reassembly.

The last two articles go back to the How-to Geek. If you support machines like I do you probably use the Group Policy Editor quite a bit in Windows XP. This tip shows you how to add it to the control panel. There is also one for adding User Accounts Utility (userpasswords2) in the control panel.

Last but not least. How to Remote Control Leopard with TightVNC brought to you by Lifehacker.

Well I am officially caught up with the articles I wanted to add here. Now I think I will try some of them out and maybe play some more video games.