Revision of Configure login prompt from Mon, 06/08/2015 - 19:52

A user login prompt is presented to the user by a display manager (DM) at the end of the booting process. The behavior and appearance of the login prompt can be configured by adjusting the display manager's settings.

LightDM

Trisquel 7 uses LightDM as its display manager. Users can override the default configuration by making their own custom configuration file in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/. If you don't have this folder, create it.

  sudo mkdir -p /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d

Your own configuration file should begin with a number 50.

  sudo touch /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-myconfig.conf

LightDM has a good documentation on its website about the different things you might want to do with it. Here are some examples.

Hiding the user list

You can replace the user list with a simple login prompt with the following rules.

  [SeatDefaults]
  greeter-hide-users=true
  greeter-show-manual-login=true

Hiding the guest user login

LightDM displays a guest session by default. You can disable it with the following.

  [SeatDefaults]
  allow-guest=false

Automatic login

You can configure the system to log a certain user in by default with "autologin-user". If you also use "autologin-user-timeout", you can define a delay in seconds during which a normal login prompt is displayed. Any user activity will cancel the automatic login.

  [SeatDefaults]
  autologin-user=USERNAME
  autologin-user-timeout=delay

If you want to log in a guest user by default, use "autologin-guest" instead of "autologin-user".

  [SeatDefaults]
  autologin-guest=true

GDM

Trisquel 6's display manager was GDM. There is some documentation here.

Hiding the user list

To disable user list on login, press Alt + F2 when logged in and use the following command.

  sudo gconftool-2 -t bool -s /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true

Autologin & timed login

These features can be controlled by editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf. E.g.

  [daemon]
  AutomaticLoginEnable=false
  AutomaticLogin=USERNAME
  #TimedLoginEnable=true
  #TimedLogin=USERNAME
  #TimedLoginDelay=20