[tlug] [Suspected Spam]Re: Autologin/password trouble

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Thomas Blasejewicz writes:

 > IS there a way to cut back on what I personally consider a sort of 
 > "password mania" in Linux?

Sure.  The one I use involves learning all those commands, and editing
config files with an editor rather than some GUI tool.  Can't help
with the GUI stuff, except to say that Chris's suggestion to look in
your screensaver config seems plausible.  The other place I would look
(but I don't know of a GUI config utility for it) would be somewhere
in the systemd stuff somewhere under /etc/systemd, probably in a file
or folder named something like "sleep.conf".  Yes, you heard right:
there are two things that can ask for your password when you've been
ATFK (away from the keyboard): one is the screensaver, the other is
the sleep function.

I'm not sure what you mean by "in Linux" though.  Mac and Windows both
require a password if you've not provided input to the workstation
long enough (typically 5-15 minutes).  (Mac at least also has both the
screensaver timeout and the sleep/hibernate timeout.)

 > I am sorry for all this uneducated commotion.

That's what we're here for, to help each other (even if it seems we're
here to publish all kinds of off-topic stuff).  However, the boundary
of what we have in common is the command line.  Much as I hate to say
it, it's kind of restricted to Stallman's portion of GNU[1].

For example, you say there's a knob you turned to set the AFTK timeout
to 30 minutes but that had no effect.  That could be a bug, either a
doc or configuration bug that pointed you to the wrong place (or only
one of the right places), or a bug in the particular configuration of
the particular version of the particular distribution based on the
Linux kernel and the GNU userspace that you use.  But there are
different GUI toolkits, different desktop frameworks, and different
framework widgets or even separate applications to handle that kind of
thing.  (And all of these come with their own circles of version and
configuration hell, and bugs to crawl out of the miles of seams
between the hundreds of components that such systems are composed
from.)

The bottom line is it doesn't hurt to post here (somebody might be
using something similar enough), but you're probably better off
posting to channels for your distribution, and preferably the
particular flavors of desktop and toolkit you use.

Footnotes: 
[1]  vi addicts can disavow Emacs here.