Saturday, April 14, 2012

Set up autologin in FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE

Now that I have FreeBSD 9.0 working very well on my old Dell E520, I'm getting tired of stopping on that ridiculous bright green login page and typing in my password.
Nobody else uses this computer for Christ's sake. And if hackers want to attack me, they're really not going to find a lot to interest them. They'd be a lot better off hacking into government websites. So much more publicity and kudos from colleagues on this.
Anyway, I set up autologin which is very easy.
I followed this guide for Ubuntu, from which I got these steps:

1. Add this content

#
# access for autologin
#
auth            required          pam_nologin.so
auth            required          pam_permit.so
account      required           pam_unix.so
session       required           pam_permit.so


to a new file called gdm-autologin in the existing directory /etc/pam.d/

2.  Add the following in the [daemon] section of /usr/local/etc/gdm/custom.conf

[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
Automaticlogin=username


Of course, you substitute your own username for username in the above.

Now reboot and you should sail by that ugly login screen to your Desktop.
Unfortunately though, you'll now be asked to enter your password for your keyring.
So what was the point of all of that.
Don't worry, it's actually easy to get rid of this password request as explained here.

The steps are:
1. Open your home folder on the Desktop.
2. Ctrl-H to show all the hidden files and folders
3. Open .gnome2
4. Now open the keyrings folder within .gnome2
5. Delete any files inside the keyrings folder by moving to trash or however you want (could cd to ~/.gnome2/keyrings and then run a rm * command)
6. Now reboot and go straight to your Desktop without any password requests.

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