[CentOS] Login Feature

Wed Jul 30 15:42:49 UTC 2008
Hywel Richards <hywelbr at googlemail.com>

Tom Browder wrote:
> I asked one of my team mates to evaluate centos 5.2 as a more stable
> distro for our business use than Fedora which we have used for years.
>
> His main objection so far has been the lack of a neat feature of
> recent Fedoras (at least since 7) that allows a user to login as
> himself if the screen is locked by another user (a switch user
> feature).
>
> Is that feature available or is it planned?
>
>
>   
One way to do this is to do Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or F2, F3, etc) to bring up one 
of the plain text terminals, and you can just log in there.

If you just need a text terminal then this is all you need.

If you need a graphical terminal, then in the text terminal you need to 
type:

startx -- :1

and this will bring up your desktop (no need to log in, as you have done 
already).

You can switch between this and the locked terminal by using Ctrl-Alt-F7 
and Ctrl-Alt-F8 (probably).

When you have finished with your session, you "log out" as usual, and 
you then drop back out to your text terminal (still logged in). You 
logout from that, and then Ctrl-Alt-F7 will bring back the locked terminal.

Hywel.