Lightdm. Linux: How to Enable Automatic Login in Lightdm

When you turn on the computer, after the operating system has finished booting, the screen where you have to enter the password to log in to the desktop will appear. If the computer is physically secured or if there is little chance that others will access your computer, you may want to enable automatic login so you can access the desktop faster.

TipsMake.com showed you how to enable automatic login in Ubuntu, but if you are using LightDM, here are the steps to enable autologin in LightDM.

How to activate autologin in LighDM

1. Open a terminal and enter:

 sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf 

2. Scroll down and find the lines:

 #autologin-guest=false #autologin-user=user #autologin-user-timeout=0 

3. Uncomment the lines by deleting # in front of each line. Change the autologin-user field to your username, as follows:

 autologin-guest=false autologin-user=damien autologin-user-timeout=0 

4. Save the file by pressing Ctrl + O and exit (using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + X ).

Restart the computer and it will automatically log into the desktop.

Additional installation for different Linux versions

Linux Mint

Linux Mint's Desktop Cinnamon by default is using LightDM, but it does not come with lightdm.conf file. Follow these steps:

1. Open file:

 sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/70-linuxmint.conf 

2. Add the following lines, change 'damien' to your own username:

 autologin-guest=false autologin-user=damien autologin-user-timeout=0 

Save and exit the file. Restart the computer for the feature to take effect.

Arch Linux

If you are using Arch Linux, you must add users to the autologin group before you can use this feature:

 sudo groupadd -r autologin sudo gpasswd -a username autologin 

Then, follow the steps above to activate the autologin lines in lightdm.conf file.

It's easy to enable automatic login for LightDM, as long as you feel safe doing so.

Hope you are succesful.