disabling username and passwords on clients

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

> Is it possible to configure thin clients so that they boot directly to 
> the desktop without prompting for a username or password?

Don't take this as your final answer, it's just my experiences (which 
are mostly from Debian, from before Ubuntu, and might be better 
solutions now). And this relies on some scripting/sudo/su/X knowledge.

I imagine there is kiosk setups/distros/packages you might look at that 
would be easier to set up than this solution.

--

You can enter GDM configuration with the usual GDM configuration tool 
and set it to auto-login to a specific account. The problem with this is 
that everybody will share an account, which might cause problems with 
launching firefox for instance.

Auto-logging into different accounts, one per thin-client, is more 
tricky (I think). If you don't want documents and settings preserved 
between sessions you can use what we use for our "guest" account setup 
(not exactly plug and play, relies on installing custom non-Ubuntu scripts):

http://fredtun.modula.no/ltsp/index.htm

If you want the documents preserved then it would be possible to emulate 
the strategy used there (put something early in /etc/X11/Xsession.d that 
detects that the username is "thinclient", and change the session to run 
as the thin clients name instead, extractable from the $DISPLAY 
environment variable).

However, using thin-clients I'd rather set up a shared storage area and 
link to it in the template guest profile, than locking the documents to 
the physical work place...

// Dag Sverre Seljebotn