Automatically Login to gOS 2.0

The last cou­ple of week­ends I tin­kered with the gOS 2.0 beta. It def­i­nitely looks bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion. The gianor­mous icons were just way too big for a res­o­lu­tion of 1024×768. This will def­i­nitely make a more appeal­ing inter­net appli­ance for my guests than my pre­vi­ous box. To make it login auto­mat­i­cally as a guest user took a bit of work, though, since this capa­bil­ity was not part of the ini­tial install.

In order to cre­ate the guest user account, the eas­i­est way is to use the Users and Groups appli­ca­tion. This is not installed by default. You need to first install this via Synaptic/apt-get. The pack­age to install is gnome-system-tools. It will install other com­pli­men­tary admin­is­tra­tion util­i­ties. Once you start Users and Groups it will be straight-forward, as to how to add a user. Just put in the user­name, real name and keep the “Desk­top user” pro­file, set the pass­word, and click OK. Every­thing else you can safely ignore.

The next thing to setup is the auto-login. gOS 2.0 uses Entrance as the dis­play manager—worst mis­nomer ever by the way. In Linux, the dis­play man­ager is the name of the graph­i­cal login. Why couldn’t they just call it the graph­i­cal login man­ager. Any­how, Entrance does not have an auto-login set­ting (yet?). So to get that fea­ture you need to install the Gnome dis­play man­ager, gdm, again using Synap­tic or apt-get. Dur­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion phase of the instal­la­tion it should prompt you which dis­play man­ager you want to be used by default. Make sure to select gdm. After­wards, just open the Login Win­dow pref­er­ences and go to the Secu­rity tab. There you will find a check­box to Enable Auto­matic Login. Choose the guest account as the user and that’s all there is to it.

Option­ally, you can install the greenos-gdm-theme. This will make the login screen and OS have con­ti­nu­ity. Once installed, you set the dis­play man­ager theme via the Login Win­dow pref­er­ences. Just select the “gos” theme and make sure the “Theme” set­ting is set to “Selected only.”

The last thing to do is to pre­vent Entrance from start­ing up. You might think to sim­ply unin­stall it. Don’t. The prob­lem with that method is that the entrance pack­age is a depen­dency of the entrance-theme-greenos pack­age which is a depen­dency of the greenos-artwork pack­age. Unin­stalling Entrance, means unin­stalling a good por­tion of the gOS theme art. So the workaround is to install the Boot-Up Man­ager, bum. After installing the Boot-Up Man­ager, start it up and sim­ply uncheck “The enlight­ened login man­ager, entrance,” and you’re good to go.

After fin­ish­ing all this, it might have been much eas­ier just to use the same method I used orig­i­nally for my first guest com­puter rather than install gdm. Some­thing to try next time.