The perfect guest account

Someone asked for a tutorial on my perfect guest account. So here we are.

Note that this works for me on Arch Linux. It should work on most distros but no promises. There's also a lot of room for improvement here, feel free to criticise.

First you'll want to download the Ratpoison window manager. You should be able to get it through your package manager.

Next you'll create a a new guest account. For simplicity I'll use "guest" as the username and password, but I don't reccomend this in practice for security reasons.

Create user guest.

useradd -m -g users -G audio,video -s /bin/bash guest

Set password

passwd guest

That will prompt you for a password, which you'll have to confirm.

Now follow these direction for the guest account so you can login as guest from a tty.

In guest's ~/.xinitrc add

exec ratpoison

Now in guest's ~/.ratpoisonrc add

startup_message off
exec firefox

Switch to a vt, <ctrl> +<alt>+ <F2> is good, login as guest and see if it worked.

If it did you now have a guest account with nothing but Firefox. Perfect for nosy people wanting to use your computer.