Autologin on lightdm

[sikejsudjek]

Hi, just upgraded to 18.2 and installed light dm. How do I autologin ? I've found a couple of tutorials for other distros and edited the lightdm config file but its still asking for a password ?

[ehtron]

Hi

copy this in the terminal
for the current user.

Code: Select all

echo "autologin-user="$USER | sudo tee -a /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

and reboot

[Pjotr]

@ehtron: shouldn't the contents of lightdm.conf be a bit more, namely:

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[Seat:*]
autologin-guest=false
autologin-user=username
autologin-user-timeout=0

.... where 'username' needs to be replaced by, well, the user name?

[sikejsudjek]

Thanks Pjotr that worked - I think I edited the wrong file before.

[sikejsudjek]

Spoke too soon ! Worked the first time - now login screen is back. It briefly flashes up a text saying x server failed to start, lightdm login comes back, and if I put in password it loads up mint correctly. Doesn't seem to want to autologin whatever I do....

[ehtron]

Hi

do you used my setup?

please show your conf

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cat /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

[Pjotr]

Note that the user name isn't allowed to contain capital letters "under the hood"....

[sikejsudjek]

Thanks seems to be working now. Somehow the file had a couple of extra entries. Removing these and mdm seems to have fixed it. Thanks all for your help !

[rambo919]

Merely having mdm and lightdm installed at the same time created problems for me too(including that flashing blue screen prompt), as if both were trying to run the desktop even though lightdm was clearly set as the default... might be because mdm was set to auto login and lightdm was not?

[Cosmo.]

If you have an upgraded system (with mdm from the previous version) and activated auto-login and install after that lightdm, auto-login will be automatically set for lightdm

In the official instructions is set, that after installing lightdm mdm must get removed. Following my experiments the system will not properly shutdown if both are installed, although in theory they should be able to coexist.

[rambo919]

Nope auto-login was set previously, did not do it. Edited the conf manually now as previously shown a few posts up.... infinite booting. Booted into recovery mode and removed those three lines, boots fine but of course no auto logon.

[Mr_Sinister]

It works well for me. Thank you.

[Terryphi]

I have upgraded to 18.2 and installed lightDM and removed mdm. Everything is fine but I now need to make it autologin. I have read the posts above but I do not have file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf . Should it already exist or does it need to be created? No one mentioned this.

[Cosmo.]

It has to get created. But you can make your life easier: Open the settings for the login window and disable the guest account. You can at once enable it again, if you want. This step creates the file automatically and - more important - creates inside also the necessary file structure; so only the 2 lines for activating auto-login need to get added (the last 2 lines as given by Pjotr).

[Terryphi]

Thanks Cosmo for your clear explanation. That worked perfectly.

[Mr_Sinister]

To be quite honest I don't really understand the purpose of making autologin active so difficult. Linux Mint is supposed to be user friendly so this is a huge misunderstanding in my opinion. All in all it's possible but still - no nice menu with even nicer switch just to activate one simple option is a faux pas. I think we can all agree editing (or creating in this case) configuration files is not the most user friendly solution to choose.

[Cosmo.]

I would agree, but a developer here calls that nitpicking.

[Terryphi]

Just for the record, Cosmo. I for one find your forum contributions very helpful.

[jameskga]

Me too. I also enjoy his style.

Keep going Cosmo.

[Pjotr]

I would agree, but a developer here calls that nitpicking.

I don't want to post in that thread, because it has gone sour....

First of all, I consider your contributions as very valuable for this community. Your advice is always expert and helpful.

But I know a bit about translations, because I've been an active Dutch translator since 2011. Both upstream (applications) and downstream (the distributions).

The Mint and Ubuntu developers don't concern themselves with translations at all. They leave that entirely to the translation teams on Launchpad, which are completely autonomous. So if you wish to correct an existing translation, you should notify the Launchpad translation team for your language. Or request to join that team....