I'm running Fedora core 4 with Gnome 2.14.0 and it will not allow me to configure auto login as root. The users selection list is blank, except when I select allow all users from etc\passwrd in which two users then appear in the list - ones that were created after installation by the former admin.

If I add root to the allowed users list it still does not appear in the selection list for auto login. There must be some other restriction placed on root login somehow but I cannot find it. The server is in a locked cabinet and runs a backup script only so I'm not concerned about security - I just want it to complete the boot up process and log in as root after a power failure or other anomaly without intervention.

Any thoughts?
Thanks!

If there's nobody there, why would you need it to login at all??
Surely all it's work is in cron jobs or daemons started by the boot process?

who runs servers with a gui?

Well, I know what you mean, but these days, a GUI isn't much overhead unless you are actually using it ie typing into it.
Otherwise, most of it gets unloaded and/or shuffled off into swap and only a stub remains in RAM.

The boot process is complete at the moment that a login prompt appears. No need to login to complete the boot process. If there are some scripts running when root logs in, consider to place them somewhere else (rc.local comes to mind)

Can you login as root in the graphical environment under normal circumstances? If not, you can search the forums as the question for root access in the GUI has been asked a couple of times recently.

Really the issue is I need to offload the backups the machine is perfoming onto a Windows box manually and I use VNC to get to the server remotely. VNC server for some reason doesn't load until after the root login so if I could get it to load up on boot that would fix the problem - I would need to make sure the scripts that retrieves the data from the remote web server that this machine backs up and rotates logs are running without a user logged in.

To answer your question without a question:

edit inittab

4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin root tty<n>

edit root's .bash_profile

startx <etc>

It's not necessarily graceful, plus, if root logs in on another tty, another x session will be attempted, but it works.

As Per Wim, use /etc/rc.local to start any procs you want at boot.
It's the last startup file that is called.