[Nottingham] Log in to X11 at boot

[Mike Cardwell]

* on the Mon, May 26, 2014 at 05:29:02PM +0100, Martin wrote:

>> For the record, I've sorted it now. I found this page which explained
>> exactly what I needed to do:
>> 
>> http://elinux.org/RPi_Debian_Auto_Login
> 
> Thanks for the solution... Good you've got it going. 
> 
> OK... So...
> 
> Anyone care to explain what that gobbledegook does and why?!
> 
> Why is that needed for startx?...
> 
> Is there not always at least a local console always available in any
> case without needing the forced login shell...?

I would also be interested in hearing a good explanation for this too.
I think the problem I was having before was that the "pi" user wasn't
logged in when I tried to run startx. That is what I suspected
previously, and why I tried setting up ssh keys to trick it into
being logged in. But that didn't work either.

As an aside to this. I've realised that Chromium has a "kiosk" mode.
I've removed x11.pl from my .xinitrc and added this:

chromium -incognito -kiosk ~/html/test.html

Now when my pi starts up, it fires up an X display and runs Chromium
in full screen mode and loads test.html. I'll install a local web
server so I can make it display something more interesting than a
static page.

The pi is currently plugged in to my scanner. The purpose of this
project is to make it so that I can do the following:

1.) Turn scanner on
2.) The PI's screen automatically detects this and turns on
3.) Put a sheet onto the scanner.
4.) Press a button on my pi's touch screen to trigger the scan
5.) Determine file name using OCR on the scanned image and then
    save it into my dropbox.

It's a dumb usb scanner. Originally I had to plug a computer in via
USB and then trigger the scan from that computer. Then I got a PI,
plugged that into the scanner via USB and also into the network via
ethernet, and installed "saned" on it, turning the scanner into a
network scanner instead of a USB one. However I still needed to
start up another computer in order to communicate with saned to
trigger a scan. Now with the screen, I should be able to trigger a
scan without having to turn another machine on as I can just use
the touchscreen on my PI.

Well, I know it works because I've already got it doing 1-4. I've
just got to polish it now.

Perhaps it will display a preview of the scanned image. It will
have multi user support and will email the scan to different
addresses or save to dropbox depending on the user. It will allow
you to scan multiple pages to a single file. It will run each
image through OCR and store the text with the scan as an
integrated PDF so I can perform text searches and copt/paste from
the scanned docs.

-- 
Mike Cardwell  https://grepular.com https://emailprivacytester.com
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