Starting desktop servers at bootup

Vine
1

I don’t want to “take control” of the system so System Server doesn’t appear to be the answer. What I would like is for the system to start each users desktop server at boot allowing multiple users to connect to their desktop on the Mac and leave a user logged in at the Mac locally uninterrupted.

Is there a way to have VNC desktop servers for each user started at bootup?

2

No, that’s not possible. Until the user logs in, there’s no user session to associate the application execution with. There’s no way to start the user sessions in the background.

3

It is actually possible – but the only way to do it with the built-in Apple resources may be more than what you were looking for.

As EggplantMatt says, you DO need a user session for Vine’s Desktop Server to attach to. So you can get one of those when a user logs in, so you CAN set your system to log in one user on boot-up, that’s just in the standard System Preferences for Accounts. So that user can be set to launch Vine Server (as a desktop app) on log in.

So that’s just the initial user – but, if you want, that user can run a script (also on login) to trigger a Fast User Switch to a second user who can also be configured to launch a desktop Vine server and so on. Your final user can actually also drop all the way back to the Log In Screen (if you want).

Caveats to this approach –
[list]*It really only works if your users don’t have passwords set, otherwise the Fast User Switch script just brings up a password prompt.

  • It leaves all your users pre-logged in, that consumes a fair bit of memory and resources
  • It makes your startup process very slow and involved.[/list:u]
    If anyone is interested in this approach I have some scripts that do the fast user switching as an example (it’s just a couple of lines of shell code).
    There are bound to be more sophisticated ways to accomplish this, if anyone else has clever ideas please post them here.
4

This is more or less what I am looking for. Since I am not so familiar with Mac OS X stuff could you please provide the mentioned shell script ?

5

could you please send the bash examples?

[quote=“JonathanOSX”]It is actually possible – but the only way to do it with the built-in Apple resources may be more than what you were looking for.

As EggplantMatt says, you DO need a user session for Vine’s Desktop Server to attach to. So you can get one of those when a user logs in, so you CAN set your system to log in one user on boot-up, that’s just in the standard System Preferences for Accounts. So that user can be set to launch Vine Server (as a desktop app) on log in.

So that’s just the initial user – but, if you want, that user can run a script (also on login) to trigger a Fast User Switch to a second user who can also be configured to launch a desktop Vine server and so on. Your final user can actually also drop all the way back to the Log In Screen (if you want).

Caveats to this approach –
[list]*It really only works if your users don’t have passwords set, otherwise the Fast User Switch script just brings up a password prompt.

  • It leaves all your users pre-logged in, that consumes a fair bit of memory and resources
  • It makes your startup process very slow and involved.[/list:u]
    If anyone is interested in this approach I have some scripts that do the fast user switching as an example (it’s just a couple of lines of shell code).
    There are bound to be more sophisticated ways to accomplish this, if anyone else has clever ideas please post them here.[/quote]