Auto login

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 07 Jun 2007, Alfred Nutile wrote:

> could you explain a little more this process of setting up the lts.conf
> to auto login.

I gather this is in response to a post of mine.  As I said, it's not
something which is available right now.

However, I think it requires a fairly small amount of tinkering.  This is
all in theory of course, I haven't actually done it.

In /opt/ltsp/i386/usr/sbin/ldm you can see lines like:

        self.server = get_config('SERVER')
        self.use_xfs = get_config_bool('USE_XFS')

which (as far as I understand) allow LDM to read the settings initially
created in /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf (there may be something else
involved, but that can probably be done too).

Armed with this preseeded username and password (or perhaps just a username
with a private key on the thin client chroot), you could modify the ldm
run() method to call spawn_session() with this username and password after
a certain delay, at a certain time of day, on boot or whatever you like.
You just need to figure out how to express what you want in Python.

Alternatively, ldm itself gets started from:

	/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/rc2.d/S20ltsp-client

helped by:

	/opt/ltsp/i386//usr/lib/ltsp/ltsp_config

which you could probably modify to just automatically login without
starting LDM at all.  This could be a bit rough though, there'd be no
friendly way to shut the client down, login as a different user, etc.

Of course, unless Oliver et al accept such a change to edubuntu, this would
count as an "unsupported hack" so if it caused you problems you'd have to
deal with them -- of course we'll help if we can on-list though.  I guess
that's not so different to the current situation though.

Gavin

PS: I believe ldm is currently being rewritten in C++.  One downside of
this rewrite is that it will substantially increase the barrier to hacking
ldm for one's own needs, arguably making edubuntu/ltsp less flexible.  This
should possibly be taken into account.