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Booting to an application in linux 1

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dustervoice

Technical User
Apr 2, 2009
56
GB
does anyone know how i can configure redhat to boot straight into an application right after authentication? IE. i don't want to see xwindows; i want to boot directly into virtual box application.
 
not sure when you mean....
if you see a graphical screen then xwindows or a display manager of some flavour is already running.
if it is from a login text prompt then adding the command to start the application can be put in your ~/.profile file.

 
what i want to do is boot straight into an APPLICATION. like for example i have firefox installed on my linux machine. what i want to do is after i log in i want firefox to be my "GUI" shell. I dont want to see any xwindows,gnome or kde... like in windows where you can drop the explorer gui and just boot any application you want.
 
Firefox, or any other browser is an application that doesn't have any graphics capability of it's own. It requires a GUI to be running. It then just uses that GUI interface to do whatever it does.

That's the same way Windows works. Windows provides all of the GUI functionality including windows and menus and buttons and such. Any app you run in Windows just requests the Windows GUI manager to open a window on it's behalf and display whatever the app asks in the window.

Are you looking to make this book up in some kind of kiosk mode?


 
Make your system boot to runlevel 3 so that it doesn't start a display manager such as xdm/gdm/kdm. Then create your own startup script in runlevel 3 that starts the X server manually, and then runs your application, something like:

Code:
/usr/X11R6/bin/X &
# give X a chance to start up
sleep 2
DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/firefox
# kill the X server when firefox exits
kill %1

Annihilannic.
 
That worked thanks a lot. i just need to read up on linux startup scripts...
 
Ive added it to my .bash_profile and it works whenever i log in .. how to i get that to start for all users who log into the system.. which file do i need to edit?
 
/etc/profile is the global equivalent of your personal .bash_profile, however if you are indeed implementing a kiosk or similar you may want to do it through an init script or directly from /etc/inittab. Be careful what you do in there though!

Annihilannic.
 
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