Autostart application at login time

Dear members of Gnome community!

I am trying to run a GUI application at login time. I added application launcher to /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow folder. It works just fine in CentOS 6.10 which uses gdm-2.30.4-69. I tried launching xterm, gnome-terminal and simple bash command. All worked.

However any of that fails to work on Red OS 7.3 which uses gdm-3.38.2-4

It appears that autostart folder contents are silently ignored. I examined source code for vanilla gdm 2.30.4 and found mentioning of autostart/LoginWindow folder. In vanilla gdm-3.38.2 and gdm-42.0 it is only mentioned in various documentation files.

It this thing supposed to work as documented? If yes, can you give me some pointers so I can debug/trace it further.

To give you an idea of what I am trying to do:
We work on face recognition PAM module and it is needed to display user’s face captured by the camera as it is seen by the AI algorithms. If you have ideas how to implement such thing with GDM please let me know.

Nikolay Samofatov

I think this is still the reference documentation, from the freedesktop.org project:
autostart-spec

Since GNOME 41, it is possible to use gnome-shell extensions that mark themselves compatible with the ‘gdm’ session-mode on the login screen.

(The feature has been backported to RHEL 8.5, but not 7.x)

Running external graphical applications on the other hand is not supported. They can be launched, but any window is hidden on the login screen, and any user input goes exclusively to the login screen.

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