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detly
Asked: 2012-01-03 17:20:02 +0800 CST

How do I hide a particular user from the login screen?

  • 772

How do I hide a particular user from the login screen on a default install of 11.10 and higher? (ie. using Unity Greeter)?

lightdm

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If your system uses AccountsService, you can not hide a user from the greeter screen by reconfiguring lightdm because it defers to AccountsService. That is stated very clearly in the comments in /etc/lightdm/users.conf.

    What you need to do instead is to reconfigure AccountsService.

    To hide a user named XXX, create a file named

    /var/lib/AccountsService/users/XXX

    containing two lines:

    [User]
SystemAccount=true

    If the file already exists, make sure you append the SystemAccount=true line to the [User] section.

    The change takes effect after reloading AccountsService:

    sudo systemctl restart accounts-daemon.service
    • 129

  2. Currently this method is not working because of a bug in lightdm.

    Please check the bug status before applying this method.

    Heres what you want to do:

    First, make a backup of your config.

    sudo cp /etc/lightdm/users.conf /etc/lightdm/users.conf.bak

    Then, you need to edit your config:

    sudo nano /etc/lightdm/users.conf

    You'll see something like this:

    #
# User accounts configuration
#
# NOTE: If you have AccountsService installed on your system, then LightDM will
# use this instead and these settings will be ignored
#
# minimum-uid = Minimum UID required to be shown in greeter
# hidden-users = Users that are not shown to the user
# hidden-shells = Shells that indicate a user cannot login
#
[UserAccounts]
minimum-uid=500
hidden-users=nobody nobody4 noaccess
hidden-shells=/bin/false /usr/sbin/nologin

    Of interest to us is the part here:

    hidden-users=nobody nobody4 noaccess

    To hide the username james, just add it like this:

    hidden-users=nobody nobody4 noaccess james

    Then, reboot your computer and it should be gone.

    As a reference to others, see

    See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/accountsservice/+bug/857651

    On some versions of lighdm (Ubuntu 14.04) you need to rename [UserAccounts] to [UserList] (in /etc/lightdm/users.conf) for this method to work. (If you're interested in why this may be necessary, see common/user-list.c:321 from lightdm source.)

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  3. Your option until bug 857651 is fixed is to create the user with uid < 1000

    For example, to assign new uid less than 1000, (we are using 999) use this command 

    sudo usermod -u 999 user-name

    Replace the user-name with the actual user name, just as anwar or detly etc.

    • 17

  4. because the Ubuntu 12.04 setup 

    [UserAccounts]  
minimum-uid=500

    so we need to reduce the uid less than 500

    example: sudo usermod -u 499 user-name

    It works with me! SOLVED Good luck.

    • 10

  5. This method is not works on Ubuntu 13.10.

    To hide user login names correctly You must to open LightDM config:

    sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

    and add the following options:

    greeter-hide-users=true
greeter-show-manual-login=true

    Then save and reboot. That's all.

    • 4

  6. This a variation of James' answer. You can hide users in lightDM by simply assigning them an ID below the minimum ID found in:

    /etc/lightdm/users.conf

    On my PC it was 1000

    # minimum-uid = Minimum UID required to be shown in greeter
# hidden-users = Users that are not shown to the user
# hidden-shells = Shells that indicate a user cannot login
#
[UserAccounts]
minimum-uid=1000

    You can change UID easilly in terminal:

    sudo usermod -u PutUserNameHere

    It works on my PC (in 2016), so I guess the lightDM bug that Eliah Kagan mentioned in 2014 with regards James' answer has been resolved.

    • 1

  7. In Ubuntu:

    printf "[User]\nSystemAccount=true\n" | sudo tee /var/lib/AccountsService/users/libvirt-qemu
sudo systemctl restart accounts-daemon.service
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