Automatic Login In Linux And Gnome

There are a lot of people out there that want to have their Linux box automatically login for them after a reboot. As always there is more than one way to do this. You first have to decide what method you prefer to use. You can setup a user to automatically login and you can also setup a user to login using a timed login. I will show you how to do both.


AUTOMATICALLY LOGIN:

In order to setup your Linux box to automatically login using a particular user, you will need to follow the steps below.

For most newer versions of Red Hat (Red Hat 5/6), Fedora Core (Fedora Core 13/14), Ubuntu (10.04/10.10) you need to edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf using terminal and add the following to the [daemon]:

[daemon] AutomaticLoginEnable=true AutomaticLogin=username   ###NOTE:  Where username is your username you use to login to the linux box. ###

TIMED LOGIN:

In order to setup your Linux box to login using a particular user and a timed login, you will need to follow the steps below.
For most newer versions of Red Hat (Red Hat 5/6), Fedora Core (Fedora Core 13/14), Ubuntu (10.04/10.10) you need to edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf using terminal and add the following to the [daemon]:

[daemon] TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=username   ###NOTE:  Where username is your username you use to login to the linux box. ###

The methods above currently work for most newer versions of Linux and Gnome. However, occasionally you will run into some older versions of Linux and Gnome. If the methods above do not work for your particular Linux distro and Gnome, you can try the steps below:
In order to setup your Linux box to login using a particular user and a timed login, you will need to follow the steps below.

You need to edit /usr/share/gdm/defaults.conf using terminal and add the following to the [daemon]:

[daemon] TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=username   ###NOTE:  Where username is your username you use to login to the linux box. ###

If you are using Novell’s Suse 10 or Suse 11, you will need to do the following to get automatic logins working:

From a terminal, run the following command:

su -c ‘/bin/bash /sbin/yast2 users’

This will open up the “User and Group Administration” Window. From there, click the drop down menu on the “Expert” middle button. Then select “Login Settings”, this will bring up the “Display Manager Login Settings” Window. Now, you can select “Auto Login” and click the drop down to select the user you want to login automatically.

That’s it. You should now be able to have your linux users login automatically.