| First Look at ZETA's MultiUser. |
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| Written by DaaT | ||||
| Wednesday, 13 September 2006 | ||||
Page 1 of 2 As promised, here's a first look at ZETA's MultiUser implementation. While reading, please keep in mind that this is a first beta, usable but still incomplete and with bugs. MultiUser (from now on it'll be known as MU) will be available as an update to the upcoming ZETA 1.21, and instalation is quite simple, all that was needed to do was place two files in /boot/home and then from a terminal run setup.sh. At the end of the script, you're asked for a password, which will be the "root" (Administrator) password. After that, ZETA reboots. What happens next? Click below to see. Update: As some of you noticed, we disabled the comments because they weren't working. I'm glad to report that they are back online and working as before. Update 2: Hi again, two things. First, I was told that the "reboot" after user creating won't be present in the final MU update. Second, if you click below, you'll see that user editing is now possible, screenshot present. When you reboot to ZETA, you'll see the new login screen. In the screenshot below, you can see 3 users, Root, DaaT and Mr. Test. This is different from the default screen which shows Root and Joe (Average Joe), which I since deleted. There are also two buttons on the lower left corner, Restart and Shutdown, and in the opposite corner, the time and date. It's a typical login screen, with the user list, but you can change it, and have a login screen instead, as you can see in the second screenshot.
Visible above, are the two users I created during testing, so you're probably wondering how you can create one or more users. It's quite simple, and it's done in a sort of a wizard, the same way it's done for setting up a Network connection for example. To start you go to a new prefs panel which has been added to the ZETA preferences, the 'Administration' panel. There you click on 'Create User':
Then you start of by choosing a username and a full name (if you wish).
After that, you are prompted for a password, or you can let ZETA generate a password for you, if you're that lazy.
The next step is choosing an icon for your user (visible when you have User List for the login screen). You can pick one from the already available ones, or if you want to customize it, you can pick one from an imagine you have in your HDD.
And that's it. After you click 'Finish' ZETA proceeds with creating the user. This process unfortunately takes quite a while, in my machine one time it took about 2 to 3 minutes while the last time took over 5 mns. I was told that this is because ZETA is actually copying a high number of files, to create that user's own folder tree so to speak (its own home dir, config, etc).
When the creating process is done, you're asked if you want to reboot, in order to login with the new user, or to continue your present session.
In the Administration prefs panel, you can also change some settings concerning MU in ZETA. You can change, as mentioned above, the type of login screen, from the typical User List to the (also typical) Login Screen. You can change the background for the login screen and also tell ZETA to auto-login a certain user, with a timeout you define as well.
When you want to log out your current session, just click on the ZETA menu, and then 'Log out "xxx"', with xxx being the user currently logged in of course.
The folder structure is now organized a bit differently, to accomodate the changes. In /boot there's now a new folder named 'users', where a subfolder with each username created exists. Each then contains a /home structure, with the addition of 'Desktop'. If you remember from reading above, creating a new user takes a while because ZETA is copying files for that user, that is where they end up.
As mentioned in "Update2" above, user editing is now possible, thanks to some more work done by the team, yesterday and today. As you can see from the screenshot below, in this window you can change several items, including the password and login screen image.
As I mentioned in the beginning, this is a first beta, and so problems are to be expected. And they exist. For example, each user can see the folders you just saw in the last screenshot, and navigate around in another user's folder structure, something that of course, shouldn't happen in a MU environment, except for the Administrator/root. Also, the option to Edit a user hasn't been implemented yet and as was written above, creating a user takes a very long time. Another problem is that, sometimes when logging in, the deskbar freezes, forcing the user to kill it (after which it gets restarted).
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