Did you receive this error when trying to add a new user on a Ubuntu system?

I tried adding a second user on my Ubuntu user and saw the following error message.

 

I could not figure out why I was getting this error.

A bug report thread mentioned this error occurring on an earlier version of Ubuntu when certain prohibited characters were used.

There were no weird characters being used when I received this error.

It wasn't until I tried adding a user from the command line with the command adduser that I realized what the problem was.

See the probem was that the name of the user I was trying to add was "video". And that's a prohibited name as far as adding users goes. That's because the adduser script also creates a user group having the same name as the user.

So when I was trying to create a user named "video", the adduser script also was trying to add a group named "video", but as the adduser error message explained, the group "video" already exists, and that's why it was giving an error.

adduser: The group `video' already exists.

So, In my case, I had to choose a different user name. It was a simple problem and was not due to a bug. Though I wish the GUI adduser program would have explained what the problem was.

Solution

So the solution to the problem is to run the "adduser" command in a terminal. Adding a user from the command line will give you a much more informative error message than the message that Ubuntu gives you from the GUI.