- Microsoft removes guide on converting Microsoft accounts to Local, pushing for Microsoft sign-ins.
- Instructions once available, now missing - likely due to company’s preference for Microsoft accounts.
- People may resist switching to Microsoft accounts for privacy reasons, despite company’s stance.
I need a PC that runs with no monitor and gets interfaced with through remote desktop only. I just installed Linux on that machine. It currently must have a keyboard and monitor because if it gets rebooted, it comes to the login screen. The login screen cannot be brought up via remote desktop (RDP through Remmina). I also have so far been unable to find a way to force it to automatically sign in “passwordless” like it used to do with Windows.
This box runs Plex as well as whatever game server I want to run for friends and I at the moment. (Currently Minecraft, which is having trouble since th switchover with server lag, but that is far less important than being able to reboot the screenless server box and have it work with no further input )
I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.
Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.
I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.
Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).
Configuring automatic login shouldn’t be difficult. Here are instructions on Ubuntu (should work on any GNOME system), and here’s how to do it with pretty much any KDE system. This is a feature of desktop managers (like gdm or sddm), not desktop environments (like GNOME or KDE), so if neither works for you, you’re probably using a different one. If that’s the case, reply with your distro and as much info as you can provide.
That said, what exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve? It’s usually a lot easier to login remotely using SSH instead of remote desktop, and then use console commands to do whatever you need. To login with SSH:
So if your username is tux and your IP is 1.2.3.4:
And then if you want to reboot:
And if you want to shutdown:
I use an app on my phone to login, so I can get it done while sitting on the toilet in like 10s (I use it to unlock my computer so my kids can use it). If you’re accessing from your computer and just need to run a single command, provide it after the command in quotes (note, sudo commands won’t prompt for a password and will just fail).
Adding to this if you rub Plex from Docker, and you tell systemd to start docker on machine start you can also have the Plex container start automatically.
Then you dont even have to worry about logging in.