Sunday, July 08, 2012

GNOME autologin

Automatically login into a GNOME desktop is dangerous for security reasons, but it is possible.
In /etc/gdm/custom.conf add the following lines:
---

[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=
---

AutomaticLogin is given the name of the account you want to login to.
You must also unlock GNOME Keyring, a service used by GNOME programs to securely store various secrets, such as passwords.
Since you did not login, no password was given to it and GNOME is asking a password for Keyring preventing the computer desktop from being used.
You must remove the password from Keyring to prevent GNOME from asking the password.