question about programs and such on different accounts in osx

Shadylane315 said:

i will be recieving my new imac 17 inch and i have a couple of questions as far as forming new accounts on the mac.

1) when making new account for my family can i control what goes on from the adminstrator as far as downloads and such?

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I don't think so.

Shadylane315 said:

2) if one of the accounts downloads a program will that show up on my account also?

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Not if they install it into their Home/Applications folder. If your family are on a limited account, they can only install stuff in their Home folder.

Shadylane315 said:

3) will itunes music be general for all of us or different based on the account?

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Again, the music will typically be located in their own Home folder.

Shadylane315 said:

4) if i did have the option to control these things will it slow down my computer in any way? i have a 2.16 i gig of ram

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Not in the slightest.

Shadylane315 said:

5) a little off topic but when i installed my mac office 2004 on my PB, i would pick double space for my paper but it was just to far apart so i had to do 1.5 is there a problem with my program and i have to return it or is just i'm not recognizing it correctly?

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Don't understand what you mean!

Shadylane315 said:

i will be recieving my new imac 17 inch and i have a couple of questions as far as forming new accounts on the mac.

1) when making new account for my family can i control what goes on from the adminstrator as far as downloads and such?

Click to expand...

You can't control what gets downloaded, at least not with the built-in account settings of Mac OS X. I think you can control how much gets downloaded, but I'm not sure how to do that.

2) if one of the accounts downloads a program will that show up on my account also?

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Nope, each account has its own home folder. Everyone's home folder is private. However, every home folder has a "Shared" folder inside it, so the account user can put any files into that folder that he/she would like to be shared with other accounts. Every home folder also has a "Drop Box" folder, which lets users drop files into other accounts.

There is a way to change this behavior, so that all folders are viewable by all, or some folders are viewable by some, etc. This would require changing permissions, which is foreign to new users but easy for those who know what they're doing - so if you are interested in knowing how to do this, just ask here on the forum and I'm sure a lot of people would be able to help you.

If you are talking about installing programs - programs are supposed to go in the /Applications folder. But users who don't have administrator privileges don't have permission to access this folder, so they have to install programs into their own account folder, which makes them private. So any program you want to be available to all the accounts you should put into /Applications.

3) will itunes music be general for all of us or different based on the account?

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By default, it will be different based on the account. There is a way to set it up so that you can share your iTunes music, but again, this would require a little bit of permissions changing.

4) if i did have the option to control these things will it slow down my computer in any way? i have a 2.16 i gig of ram

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Nope, it wouldn't affect performance at all

5) a little off topic but when i installed my mac office 2004 on my PB, i would pick double space for my paper but it was just to far apart so i had to do 1.5 is there a problem with my program and i have to return it or is just i'm not recognizing it correctly?

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It might depend on the font you're using. You can also try typing a different line spacing number into the box, like 1.7 or 1.8.