User Default Image

Hey guys, this is Mids, and one today I'm going to be teaching you about the user default image. You might not understand what this says; in fact, it's okay to not understand what this is because it's quite misleading by its name. Image is not like a graphical image; it's a set of files.

When I say "user default," I mean the default of a user. So when I put this all together, I mean when you create a new user account on your Macintosh computer running Leopard, Tiger, or Panther, or even whatever came before that. When you create a new user, it creates a home folder for them, and then inside of it is sites, library, desktop, documents, pictures, photos, etc.

Well, how does all that stuff get there? You might think maybe they spent their time hardcoding it into the code, but why would they do that when they could just put the files on your computer? They did put the files on your computer; in fact, there's a simple folder on your computer that has a default image of what a user is.

So right now, if I go into Finder—and I'm just going to be using Finder to demonstrate because you can't really do it through Finder this way—you go to Macintosh HD, then System, Library. Okay, you have to open Library, then you want to open User Template.

Now, you cannot read this, even as an administrator; you have to be root, so we can't go any further from Finder. If you try to double-click it, it just doesn't let you. So what we're going to do is we're going to open up Terminal.

Okay, next, we're going to type the following command: sudo -s and hit Enter. Now we're going to type our password. Now, please note that you must be an administrator to do this, so if for some reason you aren't, please watch no further because you cannot continue. Or you can watch our video—I'm going to put an annotation up right now on how to enable root on your Mac.

Okay, so now that you're an administrator and you're logged in as root now because you typed sudo -s, you want to type the following command: mkdir ~/username/Desktop/user_template all in one word. Now hit Enter. Now, Alex is my username, but when I typed my username for the first time, I typed Alex neck.

So if you're in a regular terminal window that you just opened, all you need to do is type whoami and hit Enter, and it prints out your SIMP—that's your actual username, not your long username. So now that I've done this, there's a folder on my desktop called user_template.

So now what I want to do is I want to type rsync -av , then I drag that in, then I type ~/username/Desktop/user_template again with no spaces in it, and you hit Enter. Now it's copying all this stuff right over. Right now, you want to type chmod 777 ~/username/Desktop/user_template/*.

Then you want to type that whole command again /* and keep on doing that until it says "no such file or directory." It'll take longer and longer the more / stars you add, but keep on doing it until it says "no such file or directory."

Great! So it says "no such file or directory." So for me, I had to do about six / stars, so now I'm going to keep this terminal command open for easy use. So now on my desktop, I have this folder called user_template, and if I open it up, right here's this folder called user_template. If I open this up, right here's all the stuff.

If I open user.template, I can just preview it; it's zero bytes, so that's too bad. Here is non-localized, which means it's sites in there and library in there. It doesn't, in fact, have preferences in it right now, and it gathers more preferences from other users when it actually does this.

So if I do a "Show Package Contents" to this user template, here is the actual home directory. Documents has no items, pictures has no items, public has one item, in fact, Dropbox, Library—10 items. Now that's pretty nice. Preferences has two items inside because things are registered to go in there.

In movies and music, it also has the icons and hidden files, which I'm not going to show you. So this is the user template folder. Also, if you want to mess around with this but you're not an administrator and for some reason you can't enable root on your Mac, which is okay, I will upload a zip file of this user template from my Leopard machine onto macasone.com.

Shortly, in the description of this video, there should be a link to download that image of the user template so that way you can check it out without messing around with it and doing all this terminal stuff.

So, thank you for watching. Mids, and please subscribe to our videos. It really helps us out. If you subscribe, then we can make more cool videos and find out more cool stuff. Goodbye!