hide ALL users from gnome login screen

[jjstorm]

I prefer gnome not display user names. How do I configure gnome so I have to manually enter user name and pw?

[jggimi]

http://askubuntu.com/questions/2471/...m-login-screen

[jjstorm]

Originally Posted by jggimi

http://askubuntu.com/questions/2471/...m-login-screen

From the above link, I tried the greeter string ((Exclude=user1,user2)(under the empty [greeter] section )) in /etc/gdm/custom.conf and it did not work for me.

note: I tried adding "nobody" after the users, as mentioned in the above instructions, and it still did not work.

further down the post, it's mentioned by several users, that it no longer works in gnome 3.x, although some say that it should work.

however in the gnome configuration page the instructions are the same as above (modifying the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file) with the following added.

Note that the setting in the custom.conf overrides the default value, so if you wish to add additional users to the list, then you need to set the value to the default value with additional users appended to the list.

What is the default value? Is this the list of all users with UIDs below 1000, and are they suggesting that I must manually enter it into /etc/gdm/custom.conf as well as the additional users?

The above may be workable if I knew how to enter that list, plus the additional user names I want to keep out of the login screen.

Another solution was to create a file called the 'actual user name' and stick in /var/lib/AccountsService/users and add the following to it.

[User]  
Language=   
XSession=gnome  
SystemAccount=true

I did not know how to make this work since that directory does not exist in OpenBSD.

I posted this question in ubuntuforums since they have a lot of gnome users, and I was basically referred to similar posts. I joined several gnome irc relay chats to no avail.

Here is what worked:

I logged in as root. I then changed the uid of the user I wanted to hide from the login in screen to 999 using

 usermod -u 999 user

I rebooted the system, and as expected, that user was no longer on the login screen. I logged in as that user by manually entering user name and pw, (you must login once with each user you set uid to below 1000) and of course gnome acknowledged the user name and password, however, since the user has a uid below 1000, gnome did not log user in. Instead, gnome will return you back to the login screen.

Then I logged in as root again, returned the uid of that user to the original (1000 or above) and rebooted. That user no longer shows up on the login screen, and it has an uid of 1000 or higher. I have done this with 2 users and confirmed their uid are 1000 or above with userinfo.

There must be a default static file gnome uses to keep track of uids below 1000. It seems, once uids go below 1000, they can't be set above 1000, probably, for security reasons, and why the above solution works. How can I find this file, so I can edit it directly?

[jggimi]

I'm not a Gnome user, having only tested features of it. If I were a Gnome user, I'd have provided a better link, or direct instructions.

Originally Posted by jjstorm

...So there must be a default static file somewhere gnome uses to keep track of uids below 1000. How can I find this file?

That I can help you with. The find(1) program is a useful utility that comes with OpenBSD (and most Unix-like systems).

The find command has many options and arguments, and can be used to execute arbitrary utilities on all found files. To find a string in a file somewhere in a directory structure, one might use something similar to:

$ find /path/to/stuff -type f -exec grep -Il string {} +

This executes the grep(1) command on every found file, with the upper case I ("eye") and the lower case l ("ell") as options. The first ignores binary files, the second just lists the file name of any file containing string. The "-type" option limits what is searched to regular files, the braces delimit where found filenames are placed in the grep command string, and the plus sign terminates the executed string.