Been searching for this for over an hour with no luck.
Here’s what I’m after:
I want my computer to auto start, login and then play a playlist in itunes, basically an alarm.
I have set my computer to auto start from energy saver every day at a certain time. I also can get the playlist to play at a certain time when logged in using ical. The problem i have is going from the login window to the desktop (where ical can launch itunes). Is there a way that can log my computer in?
Just like to add that I wouldn’t like to disable my login password if possible in case that was a suggestion.
You haven’t found it because you can’t do it. Think about it - you’re still bypassing your login password if you can log in automatically for this event.
Probably makes more sense to change to no password before you hit the hay, and change back when you wake up.
The way I meant it would be at say 7.30 in the morning it would log in automatically by entering my username and password, but only this time of day. All other times it would require username and password to login.
There are several things you can do depending on what you want to do exactly.
You set the auto login, so when you startup, the computer automatically login to your account. From there you could probably create a script to reset the settings in System Preferences to not auto login. You could maybe create a logout hook to do this, so when you logout, it doesn’t auto login on the next try for that day. I’m not sure if logout hooks run on shutdown. Furthermore, what would you do if the computer never starts up again that day. Still doing research on logout hooks.
If you don’t need to shutdown after the first startup, then you could just logout.
You could use the lock screen feature instead of the login window to login if you’re the only user and don’t want others to auto login on startup. The computer will auto login, but other users can’t do anything because the screen is locked. Note that scripts can run in the background when the screensaver is on. So, if you just want to do automatic startup stuff for your computer, set auto login on, turn on lock screen for screen effects, and create a login item that turns on the screensaverengine.
Maybe you should provide more info to see if there is a workaround. I don’t think you can tell the system to just auto login at 8:00 AM.
Note that in OSX (unix), you don’t need to shutdown your computer all the time and it might be better to just lock the screen and sleep.
ok thanks for ur replies guys, the way i did i did it in the end is not ideal but this is what i did:
i created another account, that could access itunes and ical (set ical to run at login aswel) only and set it to auto login, i copied a script across to the guess account that ran a playlist. i used ical to run script at say 07.05 then used my account to schedule auto start up at 7.00.
So at 7.00 my computer started, auto logged into guess account and opened ical. At 7.05 it ran the playlist i had created.
Mr Joe
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