Introduction

By default, when you enter a guest session, the desktop looks like it does when a regular user logs in for the first time. This tutorial shows how a system owner can customize the guest session feature to change the appearance and behavior.

Use a special user account

In short, follow these steps:

1. From a terminal window, create a special user:

   sudo adduser --uid 999 guest-prefs

   Note: In this tutorial we use the name guest-prefs, but you can give this user any name of your choice.
   By default a new Ubuntu user is assigned a user ID 1000 or greater. By choosing a user ID below 1000, guest-prefs won't be listed on the login screen or in the system menu.)
   

2. Log in to guest-prefs, and change things to what you want your guests encounter when they launch a guest session.
   

3. Switch back to your admin account and run these commands from a terminal window:

   sudo mkdir /etc/guest-session
   sudo ln -s /home/guest-prefs /etc/guest-session/skel

   Note: The latter command creates a symbolic link. This method works as from Ubuntu 11.10.

Now, when you launch a guest session, it will be started with the same preferences as you set for the special purpose user guest-prefs.