Run application without a desktop environment

[anatolik]

I work on my project's team dashboard. I want to use a Raspberry Pi or similar small computer to show a full-screen GTK app. I just need to run my app and do not need any heavy desktop environments.

I see Kodi has a standalone mode that can run without gnome/kde. I want to do the same. I am looking at service file both for

- x86 https://github.com/graysky2/kodi-standa ... di.service It uses xinit to start the application. It looks reasonable to me.

- then I looked at service file uses for Arch RPi. https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUIL ... di.service This service is much simpler but it is not clear for me how it starts X server. Tried to make the same service file for my app and it fails saying that X is not initialized. I briefly looked at Kodi sourcecode and do not see where it uses xinit.

Could anyone explain how Kodi is started in standalone DE-less mode at Arch ARM? Do you have other examples of DE-less applications used at ARM Arch Linux.

Thanks.

[pepedog]

Usually this works
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'xorg-xinit /path-to-app/apname')
Look at .xinitrc to customise startx

[anatolik]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pepedog', 'U')sually this works
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'xorg-xinit /path-to-app/apname')
Look at .xinitrc to customise startx

[anatolik]

I can start my application with /usr/bin/xinit /usr/bin/foobar -- :0 -nolisten tcp and it starts fine.

As of RaspberryPI - it looks like Kodi has some direct framebuffer rendering support that allows to bypass Xserver. I asked around and it looks like this direct framebuffer feature is specific to RPi, not many boards allow this. Thus using xserver with xinit is more flexible solution. But if anybody has more information how direct framebuffer rendering is implemented at RPi let me know - I would like to learn more about it.