I am doing a project where I will be running a very stripped down linux in order to get a quick boot and run a task. Basically the box will power on, boot to command line, record video from a webcam and shutdown when the video is recorded. My question is can I do this using start up script and will I need to configure some sort of automatic login? I'm looking to use a real quick distro like archlinux or some other streamlined distro as a base.

Any help/advice would be much appreciated.

i believe you would do this in the /etc/rc's section.

i think each distro is a little different, so the process would depend on that.

since i'v never done work in this area i cannot give anymore help.

good luck.

Thanks.

Maybe I will add to my question. Am I able to script the loading of a program or does it have to be commands in a startup script?

Also I forgot to ask another related question. Does the system even need a user logged on to run a program like the webcam capture in a script?

each program is set to be run at a different 'level'... without user interface.

if you have webmin installed (all of it is best) then it will be easier for you to set these 'settings'.

cron is one program which does something like you want..but i am not 'too' familiar with it, so i cannot tell you it's limits.

let us know..

Will do. Thanks

You can make programs run at each boot, at each logon (of 1 or more or even all users), at pre-defined times (via "cron"), at 1 specific time in the future ("at" command) etc.

Programs that are started at each boot mostly are called "services" or "daemons". Examples are ftp server program (ie vsftpd), web server program (ie httpd), ...
These programs don't support any user interaction typically.

There are also different "runlevels" defined. This allows you for instance to run programs only when booting into a "graphical" mode, or when booting to a text-only mode, etc. For more info on this, check out:
man service
man chkconfig
the scripts in /etc/init.d, /etc/rc.d, etc

So it depends really on what you want and on how the program works.

Not physically but all processes are run as some type of account. This is why Linux has accounts like nobody that don't have physical login access but processes like apache run as the user nobody, etc.