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I want to let one of my friends use my Raspberry Pi remotely, but I don't want him to have access to raspi-config to change settings. Is there any way to block access to raspi-config or set a separate password??

E.Kh
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    You could and probably should create a new user account for him. Without sudo privileges or limited privileges he wont be able to access raspi-config. You may need to grant him sudo privileges if he needs to access the GPIO pins. – Steve Robillard Jan 20 '16 at 01:02
  • Tweaking sudo does need to be done carefully, the recommendation is to use sudo -e /etc/sudoers which invokes a consistency check on a temporary edit version, only replacing the real file if it makes sense. This can help you to avoid locked yourself out of the system. As @SteveRobillard suggests a separate account is really sensible - check out the adduser command (needs root privileges) - Unix always was multi-user system from the ground up (unlike certain products from Redmond in the US of A) and remote access by others is well within capabilities of a RPi *nix distribution. – SlySven Jan 20 '16 at 09:30

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You may want to add a new user like Steve said, and revoke sudo privileges from that user. Here is a quick tutorial on this:

sudo useradd USERNAME

Obviously you need to replace USERNAME with the name of the user you want. Then, you will need to set a password for that user with:

sudo passwd USERNAME

If you do not set a password the user will be locked until you do. Then, to revoke privileges:

sudo deluser USERNAME sudo

This will remove the user USERNAME from the group sudo.

Here are some complete tutorials, just in case:

Patrick Cook
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  • Have you actually tried this. Last time I did (a long time ago) you had to specifically add groups to the new user. – Milliways Jan 20 '16 at 03:33
  • Only if you want that user to be a member of those groups. There will be a new group added for it automatically (see man useradd). – goldilocks Jan 20 '16 at 08:24