Autologin (lightdm) questions

[Robert Heller]

OK, this question has sat, unanswered for some time now, both on the 
ubuntu-users list, the lightdm list, on askubuntu forum, and on the 
unix.stackexchange forum.  I guess *no one* has done anything like this.  Or 
is there someplace else I should post this question to?  Or is there some 
other problem?  I *think* I have stated the problem completely and carefully 
-- no one has asked questions about my question, so I *assume* it is 
understood, but *please* let me know if there is anything unclear.

I have another question: How many Ubuntu users have more than one user account
set up on their Ubuntu machines? Or are Ubuntu users like MS-Windows and
MacOSX users: on any given machine there is only ever one and only one 'user'?
A machine with just one user would never have any reason to logout and then
login to another user and then logout and login to the original user, either
manually or automatically.

Am I the *only* one in the entire universe that has set up Ubuntu machine(s) 
with multiple users?  *And* want to use the autologin feature?

Or have I hit a bug or misfeature in lightdm that *no one* else has stumbled
across? Does it make sense to file a bug report? With lightdm? Or with Ubuntu?
Or both? Or is there something I am totally missing here? When I set things up
way back when with CentOS 5, using the GDM Greeter, things worked great. The
old machines would come up and after thirty seconds would autologin to their
proper guest accounts. If one logged out of the guest account, the GDM Greeter
would come backup up with 30 second timeout and log back into the guest
account, unless you logged into another account and when you logged out of the
other account, the GDM Greeter would do its 30 second timeout thing. (And it
displayed the remaining seconds left until it autologined. lightdm does not
seem to do that. It does (most of the time) auto login the *first time*, but
doesn't after a logout. And there seem to be cases where it does not autologin
after a reboot (generally when the user does not logout before shutting down
the machine).

Is there an alternitive to lightdm for Ubuntu 14.04? Is it possible or
sensible to *replace* lightdm with a different display manager or a different
greeter? *I* am feeling that lightdm's greeter is just plain broken, at least
for my situation -- it might be fine for a single user machine or a multi user
machine without using the autologin feature, but it appears broken in my
context.


At Sat, 28 Jun 2014 09:12:06 -0400 Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:

> 
> I have set up a batch of workstations at a library using DRBL. These 
> workstations are running Ubuntu 14.04. I want these workstations to autologin 
> to a specific user (a different one for each workstation, since the /home file 
> system is NFS mounted). I have a custom copy of /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf for 
> each workstation and I have set autologin-user-timeout=30 and 
> autologin-user=workstationuser (different for each workstation). This mostly 
> works, but there are some 'weirdnesses' I would like to resolve.
> 
>     1) Doing a Shutdown from the gear menu and then restarting the machine does 
>     not always log the user in. Sometimes it behaves like the user 'locked' 
>     the screen and it is expecting to unlock a running session. I want a 
>     shutdown to imply a full logout (it is too much to ask the library staff 
>     people to logout and then shutdown). Always. These are guest accounts, so 
>     there is never a session to save (screen locking is also disabled).
> 
>     2) Doing a logout from the gear menu brings up the list of all possible 
>     users. This is OK (sometimes someone wants or need to login as a 
>     'real' user). But if the login screen is left alone and/or after the 
>     'real' user logs out, it does not automagically re-login to the 
>     autologin-user. What do I need to do to fix this?
>         
> I am not very experienced with Ubuntu -- I am an old hand with CentOS and 
> RedHat.
> 
> (I asked this question on the AskUbuntu forum over 9 days ago, but got no 
> responses.)
> 
> 

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