My Ubuntu Mate 16 does not require a password at bootup, and I can’t seem to change it in the Users section. All I seemed to do there is change the Admin PW, which I didn’t want to do.
How can I require a PW with every boot?
First, do you mean that you have the login screen displayed and you select your user account but enter no password, or that you don’t have the login screen at all and boot straight to the desktop?
Have you checked the login screen tool available in the Control Center? On 16.x I don’t remember which one was available but it should have a name like “Login Screen” or “LightDM Gtk Greeter”.
In any case, the settings for the login screen are not in the Users preferences, they are for your account settings overall.
No, I never see the login screen, it was set to bypass that when I did the initial install. It boots to desktop.
It never logs in as Admin correct? Always the User that you create at install?
I have not found the logins screen tool. I will look. Should I look for the user account settings somewhere?
That’s right. Besides, on Ubuntu, the root (admin) account is disabled by default, that’s why the first user created gets administrative rights (through sudo).
I have not found the logins screen tool. I will look. Should I look for the user account settings somewhere?
We can also look at LightDM’s config files. First, give me the output of the following command to list them and try to find the right one:
ls -R /etc/lightdm /usr/share/lightdm
EDIT: it’s possible that the LightDM config tool wasn’t installed by default on Ubuntu MATE 16.04. You can install it with the following command if you prefer a GUI rather than tweaking the config files manually:
sudo apt-get install lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings
It should then appear in the Control Center.
Thanks for your help. I will try this later when I am at that PC. I take it that once installed I can set the login to require a PW from within LightDM? Thanks again.
Well, I don’t remember exactly what options were available in that LightDM configurator (the one we have since Ubuntu MATE 18.04 −or maybe a bit before− is different and might have more options) but it’s likely that you’ll see an option set to autologin to you user account, in which case, you’ll just have to set it to nothing.
And if that option is not handled by the GUI tool available one 16.04, we can tweak the config files manually, but LightDM is such a mess with a lot of config files scattered in two directories + subdirs that we’ll need to check them in detail (thus the command I gave before remembering that the GUI tool that might allow for easy settings wasn’t installed by default before recently).