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I am giving my old laptop to my brother and am trying to change everything to his name. I have tried every online tutorial I could find and nothing has worked so far. I need to change allie@Nolan's Machine:~$ to Nolan@Nolan's Machine:~$

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Changing the name of a user is not such an easy task as it may seem, especially when the user should have administrative privileges. Depending on how experienced you are on the command line you could try the steps outlined in answers to this question:

But be warned. In case some references to the old username could not be resolved hard to track down issues may result.

Therefore I would go with a much safer approach:

  • Create a new user "nolan" with User Accounts from System Settings (unlock to be able to).
  • Make this account an "Administrator".
  • Log in as "nolan" to copy all data files or settings you want to keep from /home/allie/.
  • Then disable (do not delete) the old account allie by clicking on the password in User Accounts settings (also needs to be unlocked first). enter image description here
  • Let your brother use the laptop for a while to see if there are any issues.
  • If all is fine (and only then) you can safely delete the old home directory /home/allie.

Most if not all applications you had installed will be installed system wide. That is your new user will also have access to these. Only the individual settings for each application will have to be adapted either manually or by copying settings from your old account (look out for the hidden "dot-files" in your home directory or for files in ~/.config).

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Takkat
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