Autostarting HTPC

As mentioned I've got a dummy user set up on my HTPC box (tvuser) that needs to autologin when the machine boots up. Reading this gave me an overview of what needed to be done. I edited my /etc/inittab to change

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux

to

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 -l /sbin/autologin.sh -n
tty1 linux

where /sbin/autologin.sh looks like

#! /bin/bash
exec login -f tvuser

Note that the inittab entry should all be on one line (I had to put a line break in there for formatting), and the autologin script has root permissions, so only the bootup sequence (or me as root) can execute it. I previously was using fluxbox as my window manager since that's what I use on my laptop, however it was time to get XBMC going.

 emerge -vDp xbmc

did the trick. I then altered tvuser's .xinitrc to contain the line

exec xbmc

To make sure that X is started when tvuser (auto)logins, I set the following in tvuser's .bashrc

if [ "`tty`" = "/dev/tty1" ] ; then
  startx
fi

The conditional helps because when I was debugging some config by sshing into the HTPC as the tvuser user, X kept trying to start. The conditional has X only start of the tty value is /dev/tty1 which only happens as boot time.

The remote works so far with XBMC, however I haven't tried anything too exotic.

The boot process is a bit slow for my liking. I've got some other boxes that could do with a boot boost, so I'll probably take the time now to research how to reduce the bootup time of my Gentoo boxes.