Raspberry Pi Forums

My first guide so be gentle!

Can imagine alot of people wanting to auto login and/or startx (I originally looked into this to launch Liam's XBMC automatically, instead of startx just use xbmc) so did a guide, might stop a few questions on the forums (or if it doesnt its something easy to link to)

http://elinux.org/RPi_Debian_Auto_Login

Thank you. German translation here

A nicer way to do it is to modify /home/pi/.bash_profile with e.g.:

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ]; then startxfi Then you can log in to your other ttys fine.

asb said:


A nicer way to do it is to modify /home/pi/.bash_profile with e.g.:

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ]; then startxfi Then you can log in to your other ttys fine.

I originally tried this but .bash_profile didnt exist (using nano it created a new file)

asb said:


A nicer way to do it is to modify /home/pi/.bash_profile with e.g.:

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ]; then startxfi Then you can log in to your other ttys fine.


Is this known to work on the RPi?

Helpme1986: yep, just create the file.

naicheben: Yes, I've used it a lot on the Pi

Helpme1986 said:


asb said:


A nicer way to do it is to modify /home/pi/.bash_profile with e.g.:

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ]; then startxfi Then you can log in to your other ttys fine.

I originally tried this but .bash_profile didnt exist (using nano it created a new file)


No harm with adding a new bash_profile if it doesn't exist. It doesn't have to exist, but if it is there then when starting a bash shell it will check through it and see if any settings need to be set through it.

I assume this has worked fine for everyone so far?

That's really nice, thank you.

Can I make a suggestion, could you add a few lines of explanation to say what you are doing. It would help people to understand what's going on.

I guess that you are editing the inittab file and replacing the getty command with a login command of some sort. Are the angle brackets some sort of redirection? I guess that -f pi is specifying the user, it now doesn't seem to need a password.

The second change seems to be to add the startx command to the end of the profile file so that LXDE is run automatically.

Googling 'LXDE' and looking at the images a thought struck me. On Windows if the desktop background is a bitmap it will use more RAM then when it's just a solid color. If that's the same with LXDE it would probably be better to use a solid color (and set it in this script) considering the limited amount of RAM on the Pi.

Awesome - pulled my hair out for awhile on this topic -- seems there is much conflicting information that spins a person in circles. This worked...

Now, a small additional question:

Want to run the command

x11vnc -forever -display :0

after startx is executed. Thought I'd be slick and try to pop it in after the startx command, but that doesn't fly... advice?

@dfbob

Try ending startx with & e.g. 'startx &', this will launch startx in the background and return the shell command prompt to accept the next command.

HTH