Ubuntu
gnome-terminal package

adduser doesn't update GUI "Accounts" or login screen

Asked by L Peter Deutsch

I added some new users to my freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04 system using command-line adduser. Everything is OK at the filesystem level (/etc/passwd, /home/*, etc.), but neither the System Settings "Accounts" GUI nor the initial login screen shows any of the new users. I did edit /etc/adduser.conf to limit the range of system user and group IDs to 0-199 rather than 0-999, because I'm going to be copying a /home hierarchy from an earlier release that used those values and all the user IDs I added are in the range 200-999, but unless the 0-999 range is hardwired into LightDM or AccountsService or some other new piece of system software, this shouldn't cause the users to be invisible.

I've spent hours on this problem with no success. The system is unusable until I solve it, because none of the real users on the system can log in through the initial login screen, and there is no other way to switch logged-in users (sudo -l only affects the terminal window, not the desktop etc.).

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L Peter Deutsch (lpd-lp) said : 		#1

Launchpad classified this incorrectly as a gnome-terminal bug. This is not a problem with gnome-terminal! The problem is probably in either LightDM or AccountsService.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#2

Have you tried using the adduser command in terminal rather than the GUI method? You may be able to specify the user ID number when you make it. The man page may clear this up.

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L Peter Deutsch (lpd-lp) said : 		#3

Apparently my initial problem report wasn't clear enough.

I *did* use the adduser command in terminal. The users were created correctly in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, directories were created in /home, etc. I can "log in" as them -- within the terminal window only -- by using sudo -l.

The problem is that the "Accounts" page in the "System Settings" does not show any of the new users, and much more seriously, the initial login screen also does not show any of them. Because of the latter, it is not possible to log in at the session level as any user other than the "admin1" user that I created at installation time. This was not the case with any of the previous Ubuntu releases, such as the 8.04 release I have installed on my other hard drive: their initial login screen allowed typing in both the username and password.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#4

I suggest you report a bug

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L Peter Deutsch (lpd-lp) said : 		#5

I've filed a bug report, but since this problem is making my system almost completely unusable, I'm looking for a workaround. Where is the information stored, and by what piece of software, that produces the initial session login list? And also the information that produces the "Accounts" list in the System Settings? I'm guessing that AccountServices maintains this information, but since it apparently isn't doing its job, I'm hoping I can update it by hand. (Probably not feasible if it's in a SQL data base or something like that, but I'm hoping it's not.)

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fsetfd hytrgy (qayeh783) said : 		#6

It looks like very same issue that I am facing in my adduser updates can someone guide me why its not updating normally you can see here https://onlydoodles.com/available-puppies some details about it also.

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