Help setup a few basic things on my unix box please?

[ViLeNT]

Can someone help me accomplish the following on my unix box? Can someone walk me through step by step for each task? I'm connecting to a machine using UBUNTU with SSH with admin priviledges.

1. Create an account for myself as administrator

2) create one additional regular user account which does not have sudo
privileges, it is just regular user.
a) create a login name
b) establish appropriate group(s)
c) create the home directory
d) create the login shell
e) establish a pass word for the user
f) set an appropriate PATH
g) place appropriate files in the home directory

3) Identify the version of the OS and relative data.

4) Identify the nature of the hardware providing relevant
information.

5) Use cron to execute a particular program at 10 PM every
Tuesday.

6) Write a script to identify current users on the system with
an indication of the actions they are performing. Identify only users.

7) install xpdf

[ViLeNT]

im using Linux stubuntu3 2.6.28-13-server #44-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 2 08:40:28 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[bgeisel1]

LOL. This sounds more like a homework project than it sounds like a UNIX install, but I'll see what I can do to get you on the right path.

Typically, there's no "administrator" accounts on UNIX. Some "old guy" will probably start arguing with me about the wheel group, but essentially you're either root or your not. So, if you have the root password -- congratulations, you're an administrator :-)

As for setting up an account, you can pretty much just use useradd (I think it might be adduser on some systems, just to screw with dyslexics). Something like this should work:

useradd -c "First Last" -m username

This will create a user with the comment of "First Last" (usually their name) and a username of 'username'. The -m causes it to create the home directory if it does not already exist.

As for the system type, `uname -a` as you have already discovered will get you well on your way. I don't know if it works on Ubuntu or not, but I've always been a fan of `cat /etc/issue` for determining the install OS. It's actually the file that gets displayed when you connect via telnet (slowly going the way of gopher), but it usually contains the OS distro version.

To help with the rest of the commands, try something like this:

man cron
man 5 crontab
man passwd
man w
man 5 group

# (and if that doesn't help)
man man

That should at least get you on the right path (no pun intended).
</help with a flair of sarcasm>

-geis