The autologin tweak I mentioned in the last post is straight out of the Arch wiki. It works like a champ, and I like it even better than the autologin method for Ubuntu.
The instructions in the wiki are easy to follow and do a better job explaining it than I do here, so I won’t offer too much detail.
x:5:once:/bin/su kmandla -l -c "/bin/bash --login -c startx >/dev/null 2>/dev/null"
That’s the X spawn line from my inittab file. Replace ‘kmandla’ with your preferred user name and save the line into your inittab, and you’re one step away from a faster desktop.
And while you’re at it, dump KDM/GDM/XDM, would you? Nobody needs a prettified login. This is all about speed, friend.
I tried this method (on Arch). It’s OK and works well but what I didn’t like was that when I exited out of X, I got completely logged out of my account (i.e. I ended up at a login prompt. So then, to shutdown my laptop, I had to login to root and then enter poweroff. So I got tired of that really fast. I ended up using the bash_login method on the arch wiki, listed under “Method 3” http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Start_X_at_boot
It’s not an “autologin when I boot” method (I still have to login manually after boot), but X starts automatically after I log in and I don’t need to use a login manager. And when I exit out of X, I get dumped back to the console from which I can sudo poweroff or other command line stuff if I need to.