Appliance automatic logging in as custom user set up

Question

Found out that instruction

If you’d also like to start logging into the appliance automatically under your new identity (instead of John Harvard’s), execute

sudo nano /etc/gdm/custom.conf

and change jharvard to your own username. Then hit ctrl-x, then y, then Enter to save and quit.

mentioned in appliances manual brings out empty file therfore making it unable to repalce "jharvard" with newly created username.

Have anyone else tryed setting this up? How have you done it?

With my limited knowledge I've only been able to establish that the "etc/gdm", which apears to be suposed to be a directory, is actually a "plain text document" of 775 bytes after accessing it's properties in Computer/etc/ directory via graphical interface of appliance.

Currently i am using "su" terminal command for user switching instead but just for the sake of knowledge and cs50 manual validity would be nice to kniw how to setup auto log in.

TLDR: How to setup auto logging considering "sudo nano /etc/gdm/custom.conf" opens empty file?

Answer 1

After some Google-ing I finally managed to find this. Unfortunately, there's no such path /etc/gdm/ in the appliance neither are there such file /etc/gdm/custom.conf. Instead you should execute this command

sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

This will open the file named lightdm.conf in gedit. You should then change autologin=jharvard to autologin=usernamewhere username is the username for the new account you created. Then press CTRL + S to save and exit gedit. Restart the appliance and it should log into your new account automatically.

To revert the changes, you may repeat the same steps and change username again to jharvard.