Is this normal in Mac OS Snow Leopard?

Question

I click on Finder and I only see my home name under places. I can't see any of the other users'. And same thing if I go on someone else's account, I only see that account's home name. Also it has a house and a little circle inside it. This is my first time using Snow Leopard (not a mac) and I know this wasn't the case with Leopard.

Answer 1

What you see is perfectly normal not just for Snow Leopard, but for all versions of OS X. Only if you were using a non-standard setup of OS X before would you be able to dig around in other user's stuff.



Also, you shouldn't use the Get Info window to try to change ownership or permissions on something about a user account. The fact that you can do it doesn't mean it makes sense in normal circumstances. Sooner or later, you or another admin user will need to repair permissions for the startup disk and that will revert everything back to normal.



The best way to share documents in any UNIX environment (OS X is UNIX) is to honor the security of separate accounts and use the Shared account (at /Users /Shared) for sharing documents. Any user can add to and take from the Shared folder. That's what it's for.



You can also create a disk partition ("drive volume") for sharing. OS X allows setting any non-startup internal disk as "Ignore ownership on this volume." The partition will be like any Windows drive volume, open to anything and everything. Don't store any password or financial data on it since it has not much network security.



Each user account has its own separate area. If that isn't what you want, simply delete all the other user accounts and give your password to all the other users. Then you can keep all your documents in one account area.... but it will just end up a mess like the "Documents and Settings" area of many Windows computers.

Answer 2

The better question is why would Apple do that? They make bank from hardware sales, not sales of their OS, so what advantage would that give them? They build it to run on their own hardware. It can be made to run on a lot of PC hardware, but it takes some doing and is completely unsupported by Apple. And anyone who says it's "illegal" (Looking at you, Dave) is an idiot who doesn't get the difference between a civil offense and a criminal offense. Hint: A EULA is a contract. You don't get prosecuted for breaking a contract. You get sued. Big difference. Apple isn't interested in suing people for building Hackintoshes unless they're trying to sell them. For example, Apple sued Psystar out of existence for selling Hackintoshes (as well as some other things), but doesn't seem to care that there are a bunch of websites devoted to Hackintosh communities when they could easily sic the lawyer hordes on them. If it were "illegal" then the owners of Psystar would have been prosecuted. They weren't. They were sued. Learn the difference, people. And Dean, FreeBSD = Unix. Unix != Linux. They aren't the same thing. FreeBSD is NOT a version of Linux.

Answer 3

If you're using a regular user account or guest account and not an administrator account, then you won't have access to other users' home folders. That's normal in Snow Leopard.



However, if you have administrator access to the computer, you should have access to the folders. If you right-click the folder, choose "Get Info" and look under the Sharing and Permissions section, you should be able to add yourself to the groups that can use those folders.