How can I recreate my user in Ubuntu?

Question

I would like to start from scratch.

How would I delete my user, including all data, but still have a way of recreating it? My user is the only user on the computer. It is also the administrative account.

Answer 1

You'll want to create a new user and add them to the admin group. This should be enough.

adduser <usernane> --group admin

You can also do this graphically:

To add a new user to sudo, open the Users and Groups tool from System->Administration menu. Then click on the user and then on properties. Choose the User Privileges tab. In the tab, find Administer the system and check that.

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Log in with that new user, migrate your data.

Once you're done, you can remove the old user:

deluser <old-username>

Now, you would only need to remove /home/<old-username>, but make sure to have a backup just in case.

Answer 2

Debian based distros come without root password. Accounts with admin group are allowed to run sudo command which is defined in /etc/sudoers.

You can delete your user with command below:

deluser username

Then delete home directory of the user

rm -r /home/username

But you need an account to create your new user. Thus first of all you create password for root user, then you could create user after deleting your old user.

To do that:

sudo su -
passwd

After creating your password you could login system with root user.