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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jim Bray <jb as220 org> writes:

>   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.

The recent gdm-2.0.97 release has something like this feature,
though not as configurable.

Regards,
                                        Owen