How to remove a user. Problems after firstboot crashed on F9

[Aaron Konstam]

On Sun, 2008-08-03 at 20:28 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> Having installed Fedora 9, I rebooted, and firstboot ran. Entered my Actual 
> name, then username, followed by password. After repeating password as 
> requested, firstboot crashed. It was late, and I'm not sure if the machine 
> was auto rebooted, or just locked up. Either way, when I next booted the 
> machine (and a lot of stuff skipped here) I ended up with a login screen, 
> which showed my real name, and hovering the mouse over my name said logging 
> in as djmons. That's ok, as it was the correct username, but entering the 
> password to login to Gnome just brought me back to the login screen. I use 
> KDE, so chose to login to KDE next, and got the following output.
> 
> Could not start kstartupconfig4.
> Check your installation
> 
> This appears to be the result of firstboot crashing when setting up 
> user/password, as when I booted into runlevel 3, and tried to login as 
> djmons, I got the following output.
> 
> localhost login: djmons
> Password:
> No directory /home/djmons
> Logging in with home = "/".
> 
> This is getting frustrating now, but su to root, and create a new user. I now 
> reboot, and the login screen shows one entry for my real name, and a new 
> entry for the new user I have created. Logging in to either Gnome, or KDE, as 
> the new user presents no problems, and can login to either Gnome, or KDE.
> 
> The question is. How do I remove the original user that was partially setup 
> before firstboot crashed.
> 
> If I run adduser, It says that djmons is already a user, but logging in as 
> djmons has no access to /home/djmons, as apparently the /home/djmons 
> directory does not exist.
> 
> How do I remove djmons, as a user from the system, so that he no longer 
> exists? Then I can recreate the original user (djmons), and hopefully be able 
> to access both Gnome and KDE.
> 
> I've never had such problems before with Fedora like this.
> 
> Is firstboot crashing a known problem?
> 
> Thanks for any help with this problem.
> 
> Nigel.
> 
If userdel does not work then one can use the brute force approach.
That i, rm the entry from. passwd, shadow, group and then remove the
home directory.
--
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To err is human, but when the eraser wears out before the pencil, you're
overdoing it a little.
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Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam at sbcglobal.net