I am currently running debian lenny on an old mini ITX box (1GHZ 1GB ram OS on a 16GB CF card, 4 X 1TB sata drives) as a file server on my home network. I have modified /etc/inittab to auto log in a standard user, start X and start fluxbox. I would like the system to then start a couple of VM's using virtual Box but as this is not a high spec box I would like to start these automatically at 5 min intervals and about 5 min after the auto log in.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how i can achieve this or alternativley monitor the processor load and start each VM in sequence as the porcessor load drops below 20%.

Thanks in advance for any help or poinrers in the right direction.

You can use cron's @reboot.

For example, in root's crontab:

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the help that seems to do exactly what i needed.