Autologin under Upstart (Shallow Thoughts)

Autologin under Upstart

The simple auto-login without gdm which I described a year ago stopped working when I upgradeded to "Edgy Eft". As part of Ubuntu's new "Upstart" boot system, they've replaced /etc/inittab with a new system that uses the directory /etc/event.d.

There's a little bit of documentation available, but in the end it just came down to fiddling. Here's how it works:

First, use the same /usr/bin/loginscript you used for the old setup, which contains something like this:

#! /bin/sh
/bin/login -f yourusername

Then edit /etc/event.d/tty1 and find the getty line: probably the last line of the file, looking like

respawn /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

Change that to:

respawn /sbin/getty -n -l /usr/bin/loginscript 38400 tty1

That's it! If you want to run X (or anything else) automatically, that works the same way as always.

Update: This changed again in Hardy. Here are the details. And then changed again in Karmic Koala: the file has moved from /etc/event.d/tty1 to /etc/init/tty1.conf.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, boot
[ 13:37 Feb 17, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]