We’ve been scouring the internet for iPhone wallpapers lately after upgrading our iOS devices to the latest version – we want a wallpaper that’s swish and a teeny bit geeky.

So…we created our own – it’s the current Doctor Who logo set on a textured paper background. It should be subtle enough that it doesn’t detract from your iPhone’s home screen, but immediately identifiable as the Time Lord’s logo.

And yes, we promise, when our Photoshop skills improve, we’ll try and do something a tad sexier!

Well, the good news is that Crunchbang makes this process embarrassingly easy: the distribution has an autostart script that you can edit to run the programs of your choice. You can even specify a sleep delay so that programs load in a specific order and don’t overload the machine. This is some heavenly scripting!

Finding and editing autostart.sh

The autostart.sh script is the file you need to edit to customize your startup experience. Let’s fire up the terminal and do some editing – we’re going to fix a problem in my earlier post!

1. Browse to the OpenBox config folder: cd ~/.config/openbox/
2. Edit the autostart.sh file: nano autostart.sh
3. Navigate to the bottom of the file – it’s the smartest place to add your own custom entries. Along the way note that a double hash (##) denotes a comment – always advisable to explain the commands you’ve added to your script!
4. We’re going to configure the vino server service to start automatically, so add a comment like “## Start Vino server” and take a new line. In the new line, type /usr/lib/vino/vino-server & (the ampersand character at the end allows the script to continue processing any additional commands you might add). Add any other commands you’d like to run at startup.
5. Save the autostart.sh file and then restart your computer to test.

The Sleep Command

A useful variant is to add the “sleep” command to your script. This delays execution of your program by a specified number of seconds, allowing the computer to launch programs sequentially, preserving system resources or allowing other tasks to complete first.

A modification of the command above would be:

(sleep 60s && /usr/lib/vino/vino-server) &

This would delay startup of the Vino server until 60 seconds after OpenBox loads. Feel free to play as creative as you like with this command – you could execute a system backup script, run an application or whatever else strikes your fancy.

Shutting down unwanted services

You can also comment out software in the script that you don’t want to run – for example the novelty Statler app that says a random phrase every now and again. Simply find that line in the autostart.sh script and comment it out with “##”.

Likewise you could disable the Conky service or the screensaver – both of which are activated via this script. Find the lines you want and comment them out.

What else?

So that’s it for this little tutorial – I’d be interested to see what other things people use the autostart script for in Crunchbang. Also, is it available in other Linux distributions?

Without an automatic login, the Vino server won’t have the chance to start and therefore you won’t be able to control the machine remotely. The good news is that configuring automatic logins in Crunchbang is remarkably easy.

Step by step: Configuring automatic logins

1. Right-click anywhere on your Crunchbang desktop and browse to the System menu. Click on GDM Login Set-up. You’ll be prompted for your administration password to make these changes.
2. Now, when the Login Window Preferences window appears, click on the Security tab and select Enable automatic login. You need to use the drop-down box to select the user account to log in when the computer starts.
3. Save your settings and reboot the computer. It should log in automatically first time.

And that’s it. In our next tutorial, we’ll be looking at making applications start automatically when the Crunchbang computer starts up.

The problem being that the machine runs in the attic office and doesn’t have a screen or keyboard, so remote access is essential. But Crunchbang doesn’t seem to come with a default remote desktop server, so we have to install one for ourselves.

Vino to the rescue

Vino is the default VNC server that ships with Ubuntu and has done for a long time now. And because Crunchbang is a distant cousin of Ubuntu, I figured this would be a good place to start! Installing Vino, of course, is a complete breeze – let me walk you through the steps…

1. Fire up the terminal! Type in sudo apt-get install vino and follow the instructions on screen.
2. Once Vino’s been installed, you need to configure it. To do this, open up a terminal window (Super-key + t) and type vino-preferences. Press return, and a familiar configuration screen should appear.
3. You want to configure Vino to allow other users to view and control the desktop.
4. Under security, untick the “You must confirm each access to this machine”. You want the machine to automatically accept your incoming connections – otherwise, you’d have to manually approve each connection!
5. We set a password to secure access to the machine, and allow the network to automatically accept incoming connections. Once you’ve set the options (I’ve included a handy screenshot below to guide you), your VNC server should be up and running.
6. The last step is to go to another machine on the network and try to connect. You can use the built-in remote desktop utility in most Ubuntu distributions, or alternatively install TightVNC for Windows.

Vino recommended configuration screenshot

Click on the image for full size version

Et voila! Remote access to your screenless, keyboardless server!

We keep hearing about the benefits of Nginx and how it does a fantastic job of producing PHP based files and thereafter serving static cached versions of the pages. I’ve installed this based on the series of tutorials that I’ve written about building a functioning Nginx server.