Brandon’s Blog

Well this post is mostly just notes for myself , if someone else benifets from them great.

I have an old Intel P200 mhz , 128mb RAM, and a 6GB HDD I wanted to setup as a Web ( Dillo ) and IRC ( irssi ) station.

Since it was to be lightweight , for personal reasons I decided to use fluxbox ( not fluxbuntu ) so I installed a from a Ubuntu server edition disk and then just installed fluxbox , dillo, and irssi from there. Thats the normal boring stuff, here is the stuff i need to rember.

I wanted this system to boot right into Fluxbox , no login, no anything, just post then Desktop so I did the following:

Installed GCC
sudo apt-get install build-essential


Created a text file called autologin.c with the following:
int main() {
execlp( "login", "login", "-f", "brandon", 0);
}

( Note: Replace “brandon” with your login name ) and staticly compiled it, striped it, then put it in /usr/local/sbin :
gcc -static autologin.c -o autologin
strip autologin
sudo cp autologin /usr/local/sbin/


Now to make it run this when tty1 is created, edit /etc/event.d/tty1 and look for
exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

And change it to
exec /sbin/getty -n -l /usr/local/sbin/autologin 38400 tty1


( Now uninstall KDM/GDM if you are not using a server install )
At this point we will be autologed in when the system boots up , but only to a command prompt requiring the command `startx` to be run to get into fluxbox, so here is how to make fluxbox autorun on login

Create a file ( or edit the existing one ) called .bash_profile ( note the . in front ) in your home directory ( e.g. ~/.bash_profile ) and add the following :
if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]; then
startx
fi

and also a file ~/.xinitrc with
idesk &
sleep 2
exec startfluxbox

( Note: only use the idesk line if you have idesk installed for icons and such on fluxbox )

Thats it, save all open files and reboot, you should be greeted with a fluxbox desktop for a single user system with low end specs.

Update: Yes I know GDM/KDM/XDM can “autologin” but I wanted to have a few running processes as possible to conserv CPU and RAM on this low end box.

UPDATE: For this post I lost all ( 10 ) comments due to a db corruption, I'll be trying to restore them asap.