Auto Login to Windows 7

Problem
I have a Windows 7 in VirtualBox. When I launch it, I don’t want to spend time with logging in. How to skip this step?

Solution
I found the solution here.

In short: launch netplwiz, in the Users tab, uncheck the box next to “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”, press Apply, provide the password, then OK, OK.

Ubuntu 11.10 — Oneiric Ocelot

The upgrade went well. Here I collect some notes.

If you right click on the Desktop, you’ll notice that the “Create Launcher” option is gone :( Here is how to get the dialog:

gnome-desktop-item-edit ~/Desktop/ --create-new

For this you need the “gnome-panel” package installed. Tip from here.

I still find it very frustrating that there is no bottom panel. When I launched “gnome-panel”, it also added a top panel which hid the Unity panel :( But I found a working solution: add “gnome-panel” to the list of startup applications and log out. When you log back in, you will have a basic bottom panel with the Unity top panel. Now it’s usable for me.

Ubuntu 11.10 switched from gdm to lightdm. So if you want to stop the X, use “sudo service lightdm stop“.

I had some problems with the terminals: sometimes they were not refreshed correctly, so the text became unreadable. Here I found a fix: open CompizConfig-Settings-Manager (ccsm), go to Workarounds, and turn on “Force synchronization between X and GLX”. (edit: it didn’t help… If you have a solution, tell me.)

The global menu is still annoying, here is how to get rid of it (tip from here):

sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt

If you want to enable the screen saver, check out this article.

To enable/disable autologin, go to Settings -> System Settings… -> User Accounts, Unlock it (top right corner) and perform your modification.

Install Microsoft core fonts:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Autologin under Gnome

Problem

You want to allow autologin in Gnome. If you are the only person who uses a given machine, with this you can save some time at each boot.

Solution

Run gdmsetup as a normal user, unlock it, and allow autologin.

Update (20121020)

Newer versions of Ubuntu use lightdm instead of gdm. So edit the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and modify these lines under the section [SeatDefaults]:

autologin-user=<username>
autologin-user-timeout=0

Tip from here.