Enable or Disable Guest Account Logon in Ubuntu 12.04

Providing user access & giving user permissions have been the only most important security threat. Everyone is aware of  the threat of leaving a passwordless computer in a public place or home. Normally everyone provides passwords to their accounts on a public pc or a pc at workplace and also at their homes.

Almost all operating systems provide a guest account other than the user defined account. This guest account is a passwordless account with limited rights like guest user cannot view other users' home folders, cannot even make changes to system files and files belonging to other users. Same is applicable to Ubuntu 12.04. Ubuntu also has a guest account by default which has no password, but it is not activated by default. We can activate & deactivate it as per our convenience.

In fact it is very easy to do so.

Open your terminal and type the below mentioned command

$ sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

You'll see an output similar to the below mentioned screenshot

Here we just have to append a single line as mentioned below

allow-guest=false

Now restart your computer. You must have surely noticed that after restarting your machine still the guest account is not activated.

Well, just open the same file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf again in gedit as done before and remove the line “allow-guest=false” that was added in the first step.

Now reboot the machine and you'll be able to see the guest account activated.