Re: gdm: auto-login for cafe/library/kiosk use

[Jim Bray <jb as220 org>]

On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Anthony J Rein wrote:

> Jim,
>
> Check out Mandrake Linux. It has some sort of autologin feature,
> although I don't know if it wourld suit your particular situation.

  Thanks, but while we are using Mandrake on one machine at present, I
would rather not be tied to a particular dist. There is probably enough
desire for a timeout-auto-login so it should be done in official code; the
question is where. Gdm seems like a logical candidate, but I'm open to
suggestions for other possibilities in or outside of Gnome.

> On -1 xxx -1, Jim Bray wrote:
>
> >
> >   I'm involved in a project, viewable here:
> > http://as220.org/jb/freebox/
> > which involves using Gnome as part of Free Software Free Public Access boxen.
> > We would like to be able to add options to gdm so it would time out eventually
> > and login a default user, using perhaps gdm.conf options such as:
> >
> > AutoLoginTimeout 30 [seconds]
> > AutoLoginUser <user>
> > AutoLoginPassword <password>
> >
> > or something like that. This shouldn't be difficult, and I think I could hack
> > this in, but would like get it into the source-tree if I do so we don't have
> > to keep running a patched version.
> >
> >   This hack would also be useful for folks running boxes in safe environments
> > where they don't want to bother to log in, which I used to do myself using an
> > inittab entry like this:
> > 4:4:respawn:su - jb -c 'exec xinit'.
> > Doing it within gdm would be cleaner.

-- 
Jim		http://as220.org/jb