POSTS

SteamOS: Autologin into steam

This is part of a series of posts where I put down what I did while playing around with SteamOS.

[Steams Big Picture splash screen][2]
Steams Big Picture splash screen

In my installation of Ye Olde SteamOSe there was no auto login configured, but I think it would be best if a console automatically started into the gaming interface. So I checked the login managers (lightdm) configuration and found the parts that needed changing:

  • Open putty and connect to your SteamMachine as user desktop. (You’ll need to have SSH activated)
  • Edit the lightdm configuration, e.g. with this command: „sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf“
  • In the section „[SeatDefaults]“, you’ll find a line with autologin-user and autologin-session with a comment symbol („#“) in front. Remove the # and change the line so that it reads like this:

    autologin-user=steam<br /> autologin-session=steamos

  • Save the file and restart lightdm (will restart the whole UI!) with „sudo service lightdm restart“

It would have been nice to have the timeout parameter working, so that the autologin would leave two seconds to login a different user, but there seems to be a bug in this version of lightdm.