How to enable autologin on MATE. Working on openSUSE, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, and others

Lately, we have been working a lot on the MATE desktop environment, it is simple, fast, and fully configurable. Just the way we like it. Among the little things encountered on the road, we have not yet found an easy method to activate autologin regardless of the distribution and the widgets it carries.

In cases like this, the terminal and the bash always come to our rescue. So let’s see how to activate autologin on systems equipped with DE MATE and the cross-desktop display manager LightDM.

Configure and enable autologin on LightDM with MATE desktop environment

To configure the desktop to auto-login for systems with LightDM and MATE – on Raspberry Pi or on distro like openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc.. – open a Terminal console with the MATE Terminal shortcut on the menu and digit these commands:

$ sudo su
$ cd /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d
$ touch 60-lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf #To create the file in case it doesn't exist like on openSUSE or Ubuntu
$ vim 60-lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf #To edit the file

Populate the file with the following command lines or add them to the end of the file if it already exists:

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter
autologin-user=username

Change username with the name of the user you want to autologin to the system, like pi for the Raspberry Pi system.

Reboot your system and you should be logged in automatically.

References and resources