Category: Articles

After a few days of playing with my Unbuntu installation I finally found the automatic login options: For Hardy Heron 8.04.1

System->Administration->Login Window
Local Tab — Changes look
Security Tab — Allows auto login

Nice, but when I rebooted I was just given an equally annoying prompt which asked for my keyring password. I found this answer in this forum post. You can just delete your unlock password entirely.

System > Preferences > Encryption and Keyrings
Under Password Keyrings click on “login Automatically unlocked when user logs in.”
Click “Change Unlock Password”
Enter your old password, but leave the new password blank.

And now you have a normal insecure auto-login.

It always starts with a screwup. When I first set up my Ubuntu installation Grub automatically set up a menu which looked like this:

Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu 8.04.1, memtest86+
Other operating systems:
Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)

When I set up my partitions I decided against better judgment to leave my system restore partition alone. Now I knew that was what Grub was picking up as the extra partition but I wasn’t sure which one. So I stupidly decided to choose the first one.

Apparently the system restore partition mucks with your bootstrap even if you cancel, because after I quit out of it Grub just repeatedly returned Error 17. I remedied this by following the command line instructions at the Ubuntu GrubHowTo.

This gave me the excuse I needed to do a little work on my menu.lst. First I added a Grub splash image I stole from a German Ubuntu forum. I had to load this png file up in Gimp and save it as a xpm, then gzip the file which I found an option for in a right click context menu. Next I opened up a terminal and su’d to root to copy the file to /boot/grub as splash.xpm.gz and to nano menu.lst to which I added the line:


splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz


This worked perfectly, however I wanted to add a little color to the mix. Beware! The color tag does not work with a splash image, in fact on my machine the color tag caused me a major headache as I hadn’t commented it out. Apparently it buggers up the foreground and background tag. Which is how your supposed to set colors:


background = 8fc3c2
foreground = 000000


This sets my background to a weird blue-gray and my foreground to black.

Finally I reorganized and renamed my entries. I was kind of upset that Grub doesn’t seem to allow whitespace at the beginning of an entry but I fixed that with a dash. It now looks like:

Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
---------------Maintenance---------------
Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu 8.04.1, memtest86+
Recovery Drive (Damages Grub)


I probably should have modified the names a bit more.