Bug Report: During Installation, setting the username to staff raises an error

Hey, not sure where to post this and sorry for the formatting but I found an error when trying to install lubuntu for some work PCs. If you se the username to staff, the installation fails on a useradd command with an error saying that the group staff already exists

What Lubuntu version/release did you try to install?

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It is due to how Lubuntu’s system installer (Calamares) is working. A known caveat that not many people suffer from, and seemingly not important enough to have it fixed.

A bit technical Linux (or Unix) talk: Calamares creates an initial user for the new system with the name you entered. It also creates a group with the same name.

In the early days of Unix (and Linux) a ‘group’ allowed a mainframe system, which has many remote terminals and a plethora of users, to ‘group’ distinct users to have read or even modification rights to files from any user who is part of the same ‘group’. Nowadays many Linux systems are standalone systems (“PC’s”) and the notion of ‘group’-ing users has become more or less obsolete for these kind of systems.

However, when a Lubuntu system is up and running, the system still allows you to add extra users. Maybe in an attempt to prevent future security problems Calamares allocates the initial user its own group.

Unfortunately the group staff already exists in the bare Lubuntu system. Calamares does not handle this kind of clash between existing group names and desired new user names properly.

Besides this unnecessary, and maybe unwanted behaviour of Calamares, Lubuntu does not provide Splendid Isolation if you add more users. But that is beyond your problem, and I will not discuss that here.

You should or could use another name, e.g. staffuser during installation, and if you insist on using the name staff afterwards, there is an easy way to fix that later.

Lubuntu uses Calamares, but so do other Linux distributions. You need to go ‘upstream’ if you have a serious complaint, or maybe the Lubuntu team could do that for “us”.

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