Acer Aspire One: increased security using GDM

I use my minty fresh Acer Aspire One for work. I work in the financial markets, ergo, it has to be rock solid secure. So to increase the security of my netboook I disabled the auto-magic login functionality and run the Gnome Display Manager (GDM) on startup to force a login. There are other benefits to doing this as well (like being able to switch window managers from Xfce to blackbox (which I'll explain in another post).

How to disable auto-logon:

WARNING: take extreme caution doing this or you will have a non-functioning netbook when rebooted. Be sure to read all instructions completely before making any changes and double check your work . You will need to remember the password you used when first turning on the Aspire One- good luck!

Edit the file /etc/rc.d/rc.S

Find and comment out the line

/usr/bin/xinit -- -br>/dev/null 2>&1 &

thusly

#/usr/bin/xinit -- -br>/dev/null 2>&1 &

and right below this line add the invocation to the Gnome Display Manager (gdm):

/usr/sbin/gdm

as shown in the screen shot below:

If all is done correctly, when rebooted the GDM will present you with a welcome menu for user. I do hope you remember the password you used when you first turned on your Acer Aspire One.