Need help trying to get a script to start on boot

Question

Luke here! Although I've been using Linux as my main OS for quite a while, I'm still pretty much a noob when it comes to using it. Sorry.

I have a Raspberry Pi that I'm trying to set up with the PiTFT display from Adafruit. I believe I've got it all set up driver-wise, but to make the GUI (Which I believe is called X, but correct me if I'm wrong) show up on the screen, I have to type "startx" into terminal, and then everything shifts over to the other screen.

Because in my final project that I'm using this pi for, (A gameboy-type device that could run emulators and native pi games - https://learn.adafruit.com/pigrrl-raspberry-pi-gameboy/overview) I will not have a keyboard hooked up, this could be a bit difficult. So, my solution was to make a script that would run this command automatically.

I created a file in /etc/init.d called startguiscript.sh that contained the single line "startx", and rebooted the pi. Didn't work. After a bit of googling, I found that I needed to run the command "sudo update-rc.d startguiscript.sh defaults". I did this, and got a warning because I didn't add in LSB tags, but after another google search, I believe that this is irrelevant and doesn't really mean anything.

After rebooting again, it still doesn't run automatically. HELP! (Please)

• Luke

Also, apologies if I'm not posting some vital and important bug report or log file. Please yell at me, and I'll post it.

Answer 1

Is the script marked as executable? If not, do chmod +x script.sh where "script.sh" is the name of your script. Also, do you have the she-bang on the script? The very first line should be #!/bin/bash or wherever your bash is located if different than /bin.

I don't use a Raspberry Pi but the above two suggestions are general Linux suggestions which it uses.

Answer 2

According to this link you need to also run "sudo update-rc.d /etc/init.d/SCRIPTNAME defaults" - this will set it up to start on startup.

I'd strongly recommend however modifying the script so it can take the parameters start and stop. This would be quite easy - something like

> #! /bin/bash
> 
> case "$1" in 
>     start)
>     echo "Starting X"
>     /path/to/startx           **** <= Change the path here)
>     ;;
>     stop)
>     echo "Stopping X"
>     /usr/bin/killall X
>     ;;
>     *) 
>     echo "Usage $0 start|stop";
>     exit 1 esac
> 
> exit 0