Automatically Login And Start Applications (On DeLi Linux)

Posted July 26th, 2007 in Linux
Tags: ,

My DeLi Linux computer’s main application is an internet access “kiosk” for guests who stay at my house. To this end I needed the machine to automatically login the guest user and launch Firefox.

To automatically login the user and start the GUI, I added the following command to the guest’s /etc/rc.local file. NOTE: You have to be root to edit this file. This solution was posted on the DeLi Linux forum, but I’m sure it’s applicable to any Linux distro.

su - guest -c startx

To launch an application at startup, there are various ways. The first is to edit the user account’s ~/.xinitrc file. In the case of Firefox, you would change this section

# start some nice programs

exec icewm-session

to

# start some nice programs

firefox &
exec icewm-session

The application you want to start must come before the exec icewm-session command. However, I settled on using the method built into IceWM instead. Create a file ~/.icewm/startup. This file is executed by icewm-session. An example, using Firefox:

#!/bin/sh
firefox &

Don’t forget to set the startup file as executable.

chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup

I know there are tutorials and projects for creating an internet kiosk using Linux, but I really didn’t care to jump through all the hoops to lock down the machine since a) it would be used infrequently, b) it wasn’t going to be in public, and c) though the primary use will be for accessing the web, it may not be the only use. You never know. My guests may want to play some Minesweeper.

4 Responses to “Automatically Login And Start Applications (On DeLi Linux)”

  1. Jamie Kitson said on July 27th, 2007 at 8:12 pm:

    A convenient kiosk system:

    http://webconverger.com

  2. Brian said on July 28th, 2007 at 3:10 pm:

    Thank you for the suggestion. However, the system that my post is about does not meet the recommended system requirements, at least according to the web site.

    Webconverger can run well on recycled machines. Pentium 3s with 128MB of RAM are quite suitable PCs for Webconverger.

    The page goes onto say that

    Webconverger can run on most PCs that meet Firefox’s minimum requirements.

    which of course are

    • Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
    • 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)

    The PC with DeLi Linux is a P133 w/64MB of RAM—a little too low for Firefox 2. In fact, DeLi Linux ships with Firefox 1.5 with many of the security patches backported. Still it’s good to know there is yet another kiosk distro out there.

  3. Linden LAN » Blog Archive » Automatically Login to gOS 2.0 said on January 20th, 2008 at 10:41 pm:

    [...] 1024×768. This will definitely make a more appealing internet appliance for my guests than my previous box. To make it login automatically as a guest user took a bit of work, though, since this capability [...]

  4. Chuck Hale said on November 11th, 2008 at 12:29 pm:

    The writeup was very helpful.
    We’ve been using icewm for about 3 year. It’s a great lightweight desktop for educational use which can be easily customized.

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