1.4 will bring a new user management utility to PC-BSD. I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to take you all through it, with some screenshots.

With the user manager, I wanted to cater to both experienced, and novice users alike. As such, I’ve split the entire application into two views, both of which operate the same backend.

Simple View

As you can see, the simple view, is exactly that. It allows the novice to easily add and remove users. Other than that, you can change passwords, the administrator’s (root) password, and edit a couple of simple options. You’ll notice an option there called ‘Can administrate system’. This option does nothing other than add your user to the wheel group. This means they’ll be able to use sudo (the wheel group is included by default in 1.4), and the su command, amongst other things.

However, those of you reading this are probably more interested in the advanced view.

Advanced View - User Tab

Advanced View - Group Tab

Our older, more perceptive users may be reminded of the user manager found in the early 1.x series, well, that’s for good reason. The UI is almost identical. It was removed from PC-BSD in favour of the DesktopBSD tool due to a couple of issues with it, namely it didn’t handle the skel directory properly.

However, the backend has been completely re-engineered, bringing a much better level of functionality. The advanced view allows customisation of all the core user attributes. Colour highlighting is used to indicate problems, and potential issues. You can see in that screenshot that the ‘Home’ box is orange. That’s because it’s outside of the recommended location, namely /home, if you were to hover of the box, it would tell you this. A common theme across this tool, that you’ll also find in the PC-BSD installer, is this colour highlighting. Red means there are critical problems that you can’t proceed with, orange is just a warning.

This can be shown more clearly in the password dialog.

Change Password

As you can see, the passwords don’t match, the box becomes red. You can see here the message displayed if you were to hover over the red box.

Add User

The add user dialog above, exhibits the same features, for an integrated experience.

The user manager is currently under going beta testing, if you want to join in testing this application, and others as they become available (network manager is also in testing), then join the testing list:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/testing

See the archives of that list for previous announcements.

–
Tim McCormick
PC-BSD Lead Developer