Is it possible to disable/remove the login at runlevel 3 and load straight to command line?

yeah, you would look to change the process spawned on each tty as defined in /etc/inittab. Not sure what getty is used off hand, but I think mingetty, agetty etc can directly log you in. Alternatively you can (AFAIK) replace the getty process with a bash process etc.

Without knowing a hell of a lot more about WHY you're doing this, I can only suggest that this is an amazingly bad idea, but with context, maybe less do.

In theory it does sound like a bad idea, however the intention is for RHEL to act solely as the OS, on top of which I will run an XP virtual desktop (using VM Player), which will be used for logging in and authenicating users

OK, but in that case, why login at all? Why runlevel 3 if it's sole purpose is to run a VM program that is tethered to an X display to function?

Are you suggesting running is in run level one then? If so, would i have to manually configure a connection to the network, or is this in face possible?

No, i'm saying 5... you run vmware player, you need X running anway. Am I missing something?

I'm pretty new to this game, so please bear with me Chris. The illusion I am trying to create is that the PC is running XP, when in fact it's a virtual desktop running via VM Player on a Linux OS.

Any authentication required will be through the virtual desktop, therefore no Linux authentication or login GUIs are required (or wanted).

When in run level 5, authentication is required, however this can be set to autologin in gdm.

I've been trying to see how I can load the virtual desktop without displaying the Linux desktop.

Do you know how I achieve this?

I appreciate and am very grateful for your time and input in this thread already.

In runlevel 5 (default) the default Display Manager (DM) or Chooser is run. This presents a login window at which the user can also select their preferred Desktop Environment (DE) to run. After logging in the DE is started which starts the Window Manager (WM). In short you could: install VMWare (if you run VMWare Server make it start on boot or runlevel change), then configure /etc/X11/prefdm, /etc/sysconfig/desktop to make X11/Xorg not start a default DM but VMWare instead.

Hi unSpawn,

Thanks very much for your post, looks very interesting....

Within /etc/X11/prefdm, I can see where you can enter the path to VM Player instead of loading a DM.

/etc/sysconfig/desktop, the only text in that file at the moment is DESKTOP="", shoud there be more? Should DESKTOP be set to the path to VM Player?

/etc/X11/Xorg, what changes do I have to make to the existing file?

Many thanks again, I'm very grateful

First attempt to edit the prefdm file has resulted in the Respawn error...is that due to fact that changes have to be made in the two other files?

I'll post an example shortly.

Excellent, thank you

What I used to do (years ago) was start X without DM or DE and run an application fullscreen but I can't figure out how to do that now within the limits of available time. But apparently my VMware Server setup now throws "not configured" errors I can't bypass each time I start it from 'gdm'. Might be my particular setup but this makes I can't post good examples for VMWare. For now you could try and run it from 'gdm' this way (works with other applications): add a user account, lets call it "vmwareuser". Remove the password (don't do this with unprotected hosts and certainly not hosts connected to any network). In /etc/gdm/Xsession you see a reference to "$SWITCHDESKPATH/Xclients.$1" meaning you can drop a file in /usr/share/switchdesk/ called Xclients.vmware which 'gdm' then will run. The contents are the same as the other /usr/share/switchdesk/Xclients.* files (so copy one) except the WM variable and the "exec" line (with VMWare server be sure to make it read something like "vmware -l -q -X /path/to/VM/VM.vmx"). To be sure there's more files to edit like /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/*, /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession, /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients to cover all possibilities but see if you can run this. Now in 'gdm' selecting the "vmware" session (might remove all other sessions later on when it works) with the "vmwareuser" should show VMWare.

Thanks unSpawn, will try this and report back to you.

Not managed to try the suggestion just yet, check out the following link for exactly what I am trying to achieve

http://cyberdelia.de/2006/08/kiosk-s...th-vmware.html