Unattended Autostart on Linux

[Marc66FR]

Hello all,

I installed DOSBox on a Raspberry Pi (running Raspberry Pi OS) and it works well when I start an interactive shell or ssh but it does not if I try to make it autostart at boot. What I am trying to achieve is:

• Turn on my Raspberry
• After the boot sequence, DOSBox starts and
• Starts Windows 3.11
• After 1 minute, a screensaver come up and this is what I'd like to constantly have running on my display

I installed DOSBox for a user called "admin" so I have a /home/admin/.dosbox folder with the config file and a /home/admin/DOSBox folder with Windows and my screen saver. Everything works fine when I launch it from the interactive shell as "admin" user

I added /usr/bin/dosbox to rc.local and it effectively starts DOSBox after boot, but it does so as "root" and there is no .dosbox folder created in the root user home folder, so I copied it from /home/admin and I still get the same result: my mount c /home/admin/DOSBox and autoexec are not executed; I'm stuck at the Z: prompt

I tried using "runuser -l admin -c /usr/bin/dosbox" in rc.local and I get an error that it tries to open a different shell/tty for admin, so that didn't work either. Well, actually, ps aux | grep dosbox shows it is running as admin but I don't see it on my Raspberry screen. Maybe I need to make it change tty to the one the admin DOSBox is running in, but I don't know how to do this.

I'm not a Linux expert nor a DOSBox expert and the whole purpose of this, is to make a birthday gift for my wife: a sort of picture frame that runs Johnny Castaway screensaver

Would anyone know how I can achieve the above?

Thank you in advance

[Marc66FR]

Forget it, I resolved the issue with autologin + .bashrc to run dosbox