feh on startup.... sort of

Question

I am having some problems with getting feh to load at startup. I'm new to Linux but have been in IT for years.. any help is much appreciated. I am running Raspbian Stretch. It's a Pi 3.

I have a NAS and I have created the mounts in FStab so I mount a folder called pictures to /media. This works. I then created a shell script and modified its permissions so it runs chmod 775 /startup.sh. The location of the startup.sh file is: /home/pi My startup.sh script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 30
bash feh -Y -x -q -D 5 -B black -F -Z -z -r /media/

I then added an entry to the autostart file located at /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi.

The autostart now looks like:

@lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi
@xscreensaver -no-splash
@point-rpi
@epiphany /home/pi/startup.sh

I then rebooted the Pi... here's the weird thing! When I reboot my Pi, it opens a web browser and downloads the startup.sh file but it doesn't seem to execute it. I tried changing (within the autostartfile) @epiphany /home/pi/startup.sh to @terminal /home/pi/startup.sh.

Nothing happens. Does that mean @epiphany is the program (webbrowser) it uses to open the script with? What else could I: 1. Install to use to execute the script or 2. Is there something like terminal I could use (I tried @bash) but it didn't work either.

Here is the output of ls -al /home/pi/startup.sh:

$ ls -al /home/pi/startup.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 78 Feb 28 19:27 /home/pi/startup.sh

Answer 1

Replace the call to @epiphany to a call to @lxterminal. Epiphany is a browser and obviously the wrong program to execute bash scripts.

LXTerminal is the Terminal program of LXDE, the Lightweight X Desktop Environment. LXDE has been heavily customised but is still the foundation of the "Raspberry Pi Desktop".

Answer 2

Have you tried @/bin/bash /home/pi/startup.sh? This should do the trick.

Another option would be to use /etc/rc.local. Just add /home/pi/startup.sh to the end of the file.

Answer 3

Try a different startup location. try enabling autologin then adding

sleep 10 &
sudo feh -Y -x -q -D 5 -B black -F -Z -z -r /media/ &

to the end of /etc/profile . (make sure you keep the & symbols)

Answer 4

This is the most elegant solution to auto-launch FEH in Rasbian. I have performed this on both a Raspberry Pi3B and a Zero. While both where the latest updated version (Dec 2019) they did have a difference! In Rasbian it does boot to the full GUI for myself, nothing custom.

This is a two step process. You can launch FEH automatically when you open the Command Window: In /home/pi using sudo nano .bash_aliases add in the FEH command. CTL O then CTL X (save and exit). To show it works, simply launch the command window, IF FEH does not launch there is a problem. You can read more on this here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/usage/bashrc.md

To then auto-launch the command window on a reboot, this is where there were some differences. In both cases you are adding in the autostart file the line: @lxterminal

In the Pi Zero add the entry to the autostart file located at /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi. For the Pi3B I had to go /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi Permissions were an issue so don't forget to use: sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart You can read about that: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=227191

As an FYI, here is my FEH command that I put in the .bash_aliases file feh -Y -x -q -D 12 -B black --auto-rotate -F -Z -r /home/pi/Pictures/