Home / ubuntu / Questions / 8467
Accepted
wishi
Asked: 2010-10-21 04:16:01 +0800 CST

Auto-login to console as root - no Xserver

  • 772

I'm setting up a PC for a very specific purpose. It's going to do some stuff deep underwater... round about 3km. We don't fear fish hijacking the box locally ;).

I'm trying to set up a login: no Xserver. Works well... I edited gdm.conf not to start. Great: that's how Linux is supposed to be in the first place.

Now my next and last task is: get the login. I googled upstart, event.d - my 10.4 distribution I recently installed doesn't have this or it doesn't work like I expect. I want the box to boot and to provide a local root shell. Just that...

How is this possible?

edit: possible tags: headless, auto-login. Can't set that....

command-line automation root login

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you just want the box to start up with a root console, why running login in the first place? You can bypass it and just start a shell on any TTY.

    Programs running on the text consoles tty1 to tty6 are configured in the files /etc/init/ttyX.conf. Now, the getty program accepts a -l option to specify a program to start (default in /bin/login) - you can specify /bin/sh instead, and get a root shell. You need to give the -n option as well, to prevent getty from prompting for the user name.

    Wrapping up: edit /etc/init/tty1.conf and replace the exec /sbin/getty ... line with:

    exec /sbin/getty -n -l /bin/sh -8 38400 tty1

    Same for tty2, tty3, ...

    • 6

  2. To actually enable root logins, you have to set a password for the root account and then unlock the locked root account. If you don't set a password for the root account the passwd command will return

    passwd: unlocking the password would result in a passwordless account.

    So, first execute in a terminal:

    sudo passwd root

    you will prompted for a new Unix password. Write it twice(second for confirmation). Then execute:

    sudo passwd -u root

    to unlock the account. This should return 

    passwd: password expiry information changed

    Reverting back

    If you want to disable root account in Ubuntu you need to lock the root account by using the following command:

    sudo passwd -l root

    Second:

    Open the terminal and type:

    gksudo gedit /etc/ect/lightdm/lightdm.config

    (Orignal ) this it what it should already look like

    SeatDefaults] 
greeter-session=unity-greeter          
user-session=unity                         
greeter-show-manual-login=true 
greeter-show-manual-login=true

    (What you need to replace the original with)

    [SeatDefaults] 
autologin-user=<YOUR USER> 
autologin-user-timeout=0 
user-session=ubuntu 
greeter-session=unity-greeter
    • 1