How you can Disable & Enable Guest User Account in Ubuntu: 7 Steps (with images)

Ubuntu comes with one additional account that you had not created, that’s what called as Guest account/ session. Through Guest account, an unauthorized or you can say, anyone with whom you are not willing to share your Ubuntu system, may enter and use it, if the system’s screen is unlocked. However, your private folders will not be accessible to any guest user. But, to be on a safer side, it is recommended to disable the Guest account.

In my own system, the Trusty Tahr i.e. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support) is installed and what I have examined is that there’s no “/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults” command, to edit the “Lightdm” configuration file. Now, you may be thinking of what is the use of it? Guys, we are going to disable the Guest account, right! For that, we have to perform some changes in “lightdm.conf” file which was available under the “usr/lib” in the previous versions of Ubuntu.

Well, it’s not the thing to worry about, we”ll create it. Coming to the Lightdm, it is the indispensable X-display manager for Linux systems. X-display manager shows you the login screen that usually prompts for the login credentials. Lightdm provides the well-structured linking with the user interface and the X-server.

I hope you have understood the importance of “Lightdm”. So, in order to create and edit the “lightdm.conf” file, you must look at this article, where you will learn how to disable & enable Guest user account in Ubuntu by following the steps as explained below.

Steps to Disable & Enable Guest User Account in Ubuntu

To Disable the Guest account

Step 1: Firstly, open up the shell Terminal by pressing “Ctrl +Alt + T”. I have already told you that in this version, there’s no “lightdm” commands. To edit the “conf” file of Lightdm, the major requirement is to create the“lightdm.conf” file under “/etc” which is a directory in Ubuntu.

The etc stands for ‘etcetera’ which means “where everything else goes”. It’s better to create system files under this directory. Just type “sudo touch /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf” and press enter.

If you are not a root user then only use “sudo” otherwise not.

Step 2: Configuration file is now created. You need to edit it, for that you can use the editors such as vim, gedit or using cat command. Here, we will do it by using the “gedit”, the editor comes by default in the shell.

So, type “sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf” and press enter.

Step 3: File gets opened in the respective editor. Then, add the lines written below, just copy paste it from here and save the changes.
[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=unity-greeter
user-session=ubuntu
allow-guest=false

The meaning of “Greeter” over here is, the name of the login screen application in Ubuntu. In fact, the greeter is one of the Lightdm themes. It can be used with unity, kde desktop.

Step 4: Back to the terminal, here you may notice some of the warnings such as IBUS-Warning, Gtk-Warning. That doesn’t matter, you can proceed with restarting the lightdm. So, type “sudo restart lightdm” and press enter.

Step 5: Once the system restarts, you would find that “Guest Session” is no more available on the login screen. It means you have successfully achieved what you wanted.

To Enable the Guest Account:

Step 6: Open the file named “lightdm.conf” as stated in the step 3. Then remove the line “allow guest=false” and then click on “Save” button to make the changes.