[j45degrees]

In an effort to share a home iMac with 4 users and keeping everyone playing nicely with each other I created 4 users.

I wound up with a situation where MSN Messenger doesn't work for the new users. What to do here, does everyone have to install their own MSN Messenger in their individual User space?

I discovered that Disk Copy is a problem too. It only works for the original user. The others get a "Waiting for Disk Copy Helper" dialog that never goes away.

Can someone navigate me through these issues?

Thanks

[Rainy Day]

I don't know anything about MSN, except that it was created by the dark forces. But in general, each user's environment is separate from each other. Generally, applications are universally available, but preferences are unique to that individual. There are tricks, however, that you can use if you want to share preferences (e.g. creating a link in the Terminal: man ln for more info; or perhaps even a MacOS alias will do the trick). You may have to tinker a bit with permissions to get it to work. I've used this technique to share a common set of iCab bookmarks amongst MacOS X users, and even with the MacOS 9 environment (which is on a totally different volume).

[moki]

Originally posted by j45degrees:
I wound up with a situation where MSN Messenger doesn't work for the new users. What to do here, does everyone have to install their own MSN Messenger in their individual User space?

On Mac OS X, there are a few places that things such as applications can be installed. If you want the application to be available system-wide, it should be installed into /Applications

Originally posted by j45degrees:
I discovered that Disk Copy is a problem too. It only works for the original user. The others get a "Waiting for Disk Copy Helper" dialog that never goes away.

Last time I saw this, it was a permissions issue. You haven't logged in as root via the GUI have you?

Anyway, run the Disk Utility, click on your startup drive, then click on the "First Aid" tab and click on "Repair Permissions"

[j45degrees]

Thanks guys. I went into the Users capabilities and turned on all the programs and some other stuff in there. The only thing the users can't do is change their passwords.

This fixed all the issues but I am going to experiment with a test user setting to see how I can tweak this tighter.