Gentoo auto-login and startx

I don’t believe in system passwords if they’re not backup by some type of disk encryption. It’s simply too easy to circumvent by changing a few boot parameters or by inserting a good boot disk. For performance reasons, I’ve decided against using full-disk encryption for my laptop and even against encryption for my home folder. This makes typing in a password to login a mere annoyance. Admittedly, my laptop features a fingerprint reader, but at the time I couldn’t get it to work and it still requires me to type in my username, which I find just as superfluous. Also, fingerprints aren’t that secure either.

For ages now, I’ve just wanted to be automatically logged in and greeted by an X session when I boot, especially since my xdm died after some upgrade about a year ago or so ago. For how much time I spend with this machine, I’m amazed how long it takes me before deciding that logging in in the console and typing startx might be not such a good idea.

(It probably has everything to do with “conditionality”. I tell myself, for example, that before ditching xdm (which is one of the few X login managers which doesn’t support auto login), I first need to get it to work again to make a screenshot of my “cute” configuration. Can’t kill my darlings; never could.)

So fuck all that. I’m too lazy to resurrect my darling, no matter how cute, so I took a look at this and added to following to /etc/conf.d/local.start:

# Start X as user if tty7 is free
if ! fuser /dev/tty7 >& /dev/null; then
    su - bigsmoke -l -c 'exec startx -- vt7 >& ~/.xsession-errors' &
fi

Done. Maybe I’ll also decide to make all my console sessions auto-login, if I can be arsed, that is.