Creating an Account

12.2. Creating an Account Suppose somebody new joins your little Mac family—a new worker, student, or love interest, for example. And you want to make them feel at home on your Mac
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Creating an Account12.2. Creating an AccountSuppose somebody new joins your little Mac family—a new worker, student, or loveinterest, for example. And you want to make them feel at home on your Mac.Begin by opening System Preferences (Section 4.5.1). In the System Preferenceswindow, click Accounts. You have just arrived at the master control center for accountcreation and management (Figure 12-2).To create a new account, start by unlocking the Accounts panel. That is, click the atlower-left, and fill in your own account name and password.Now you can click the + button beneath the list of accounts. The little panel shown atbottom in Figure 12-2 appears.12.2.1. Phase 1: Choose an Account TypeAs though this business of accounts and passwords isnt complicated enough already,Mac OS X 10.5 offers more types of accounts than ever. And youre expected to specifywhich type each person gets at the moment you create an account.To do that, open the New Account pop-up menu (Figure 12-2, bottom). Its five accounttypes are described on the following pages.Figure 12-2. Top: The screen lists everyone who has an account. From here, you can create new accounts or change passwords. If youre new at this, theres probablyjust one account listed here: yours. This is the account that Mac OS X created when you first installed it. You, the all-wise administrator, have to click the to authenticate yourself before you can start making changes. Bottom: In the revamped Leopard account-creation process, the first step is choosing which type of account you want to create.12.2.1.1. Administrator accountsIf this is your own personal Mac, just beneath your name on the Accounts pane of SystemPreferences, it probably says Admin. This, as you could probably guess, stands forAdministrator.Because youre the person who originally installed Mac OS X, the Mac assumes that youare its administrator—the technical wizard in charge of it. Youre the teacher, the parent,the resident guru. Youre the one who will maintain this Mac. Only an administrator isallowed to: • Install new programs into the Applications folder. • Add fonts that everybody can use. • Make changes to certain System Preferences panes (including Network, Date & Time, Energy Saver, and Startup Disk). • Use some features of the Disk Utility program. • Create, move, or delete folders outside of your Home folder. • Decide who gets to have accounts on the Mac. • Open, change, or delete anyone elses files. • Bypass FileVault using a master password (Section 12.9.2).The administrator concept may be new to you, but its an important pill to swallow. Forone thing, youll find certain settings all over Mac OS X that you can change only ifyoure an administrator—including many in the Accounts pane itself. For another thing,administrator status plays an enormous role when you want to network your Mac to otherkinds of computers, as described in the next chapter. And finally, in the bigger picture,the fact that the Mac has an industrial-strength accounts system, just like traditional Unixand recent Windows operating systems, gives it a fightingchance in the corporations ofAmerica.As you create accounts for other people wholl use this Mac, youre offered theopportunity to make each one an administrator just like you. Needless to say, usediscretion. Bestow these powers only upon people as responsible and technicallymasterful as yourself.12.2.1.2. Standard accountsMost people, on most Macs, are ordinary Standard account holders (Figure 12-2). Thesepeople have everyday access to their own Home folders and to the harmless panes ofSystem Preferences, but most other areas of the Mac are off limits. Mac OS X wont evenlet them create new folders on the main hard drive, except inside their own Home folders(or in the Shared folder described starting on Section 12.6.2).A few of the System Preferences panels display a padlock icon ( ). If youre aStandard account holder, you cant make changes to these settings without the assistanceof an administrator. Fortunately, you arent required to log out so that an administratorcan log in and make changes. You can just call the administrator over, click the padlockicon, and let him type in his name and password (if, indeed, he feels comfortable withyou making the changes youre about to make).12.2.1.3. Managed accounts with Parental ControlsA Managed account is the same thing as a Standard account—except that youve turnedon Parental Controls. (These controls are described later in this chapter.) You can turn aManaged account into a Standard account just by turning off Parental Controls, and viceversa.That is, this account usually has even fewer freedoms—because youve limited theprograms that this person is allowed to use, for example. Use a Managed account forchildren or anyone else who needs a Mac with rubber walls.12.2.1.4. Sharing OnlyThis kind of account, new in Leopard, is extremely useful—if your Mac is on a network(Chapter 13).See, ordinarily, you can log in and access the files on your Mac in either of two ways: • In person, seated in front of it. • From across the network.This arrangement was designed with families and schools in mind: lots of people sharinga single Mac.This setup got a little silly, though, when the people on a home or office network eachhave their own computers. If you wanted your spouse or your sales director to be able tograb some files off of your Mac, youd have to create full-blown accounts for them onyour Mac, complete with an utterly unnecessary Home folder that theyd never use.Thats why the Sharing Only account is such a great idea. Its available only from acrossthe network. You cant get into it by sitting down at the Mac itself—it has no Homefolder! Finally ...