RetroPie on Ubuntu without Unity

[meleu]

@damanbaird I think a small guide or at least the steps you've taken to reach this stage would be more appreciated. We are tinker guys here. :-)

[Serj Targarien]

I'd appreciate both a guide and the iso for easy installation. Wherever you can provide is fine.

[damanbaird]

A guide would probably be easier for me since i have slow upload speeds living out in the middle of no-where. Guess ill whip out Libre Office and start typing away

[damanbaird]

AS it is my Retropie system has several qualities, 1. boots straight to emulationstation. 2. boots without any hint as to the OS the system runs on. 3. pretty much like how it does on Raspberry Pi's.

[jasonmcleod]

I'm in the same boat, but still just end up at the desktop when I add the .xinitrc bit.
I would love to see your setup instructions, and/or grab an iso!

Thanks!

[damanbaird]

I"m still here and still working on a few quirks, got busy busy doing other things though, I'm hoping to be done here soon so i can start building my Arcade cabinet :D

[damanbaird]

ok this is what i have going on so far ...Running Ubuntu server 16.04,
1.sudo apt-get install openssh
2.sudo apt-get install xorg openbox pulseaudio --no-install-recommends
3.retropie as for the norm...make sure to go into settings and set to start on login
4.sudo apt-get install xinit
5.(nano ~/.xinitrc) and add
#!/bin/sh
exec emulationstation
6.(sudo nano /etc/default/grub) and (GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash")
7.sudo update-grub
8.( sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/getty@tty1.service) and edit (ExecStart=/sbin/agetty --noclear --autologin <username> %I $TERM)
9.(nano ~/.bash_profile) and add ( pgrep 'tmux|startx' || startx) w/o the () of course.
F.Y.I this is my little write up so ill be editing as i go, but as of right now it pretty much boots into emulationstation the way i want it too, besides how often am i going to see the machine booting up really I"m going to build a full size cabinet and throw it in the corner somewhere. Hope this helps a little, sadly i could only get this to work in a virtual machine, i dont know what i did that was different. virtual machine i get straight into emulationstation on a real machine i stare at a blank screen.

[damanbaird]

i just wish i could get a splash screen to show up instead of all the booting c**p!

[damanbaird]

@damanbaird nvrmind to myself

[esmith13]

Posted in your other thread on this subject. I have been unsuccessfully trying to accomplish this myself with either the Minimal CD or the server CD. I would prefer using the minimal CD to keep it as lean as possible but I have no idea what all the dependencies would be for Retropie/ES/Retroarch. I would love to help and/or be helped with this. I want to tinker too!!!! :-)

[damanbaird]

@esmith13 HA! i responded to you over on the other thread too, i have actually gotten farther by taking a full "Linux Mint w/MATE desktop" and stripping it back to barebones.

[damanbaird]

This post is deleted!

[damanbaird]

@assault this... this is what is killing me right now

[esmith13]

BACK FROM THE DEAD!!!!! :-)

So, not exactly what was wanted, but the closest I have gotten to completing this project involved the following steps:

• Clean install of Lubuntu 17.10 with user account named 'pi' (to make compatible with gamelists from a rpi install)

• Install RetroPie setup script and do a basic install of retropie

• Customise RetroPie per my liking (including autostart ES, samba shares, retropie-manager, etc.), pair my 8bitdo SN30 controllers

• Set LXDE desktop wallpaper to solid black, hide all desktop icons (like trash), change mouse cursor to "dark theme" for black mouse pointer, auto hide panel bar (zero pixel visibility), set terminal color to black with no transparency

• Set user account to auto-login
  edit sudoers file to set nopasswd for pi user (updates, restart, shutdown, etc. won't prompt for password)

• Edit the factory 'lubuntu-logo' plymouth theme with RetroPie logo (could do new custom theme, for simplicity I just replaced lubuntu logo with RP logo)

Basically I have a system that powers on to a RetroPie logo boot, displays one text line for a split second then goes to a black screen for 2 seconds and then goes directly into emulationstation. I can update, restart and shutdown Retropie (and the entire PC) without needing a keyboard or using LXDE at all. Since LXDE is very lightweight (and the PC is decent so I can run emu's for N64/DC/PSP/PS2), I can't imagine I'm losing any real horsepower by having it run in the background behind ES.

[movisman]

@esmith13

Hi there,

Thanks for this post - some useful tweaks there. Did you install the 64-bit version of Lubuntu 17.10?

I have done something similar because I wanted to try Dreamcast, Gamecube emulation on an x86 install, but as I am a Linux novice and wanted to get used to the OS, I started out with Linux Mint. To be fair everything works pretty well so far and i've done some similar boot tweaks, albeit they not quite as slick as yours.

I may consider switching over to Lubuntu if there is an obvious benefit. It is clearly much more lightweight. Is there anything to be aware of before doing this, or any tips you can share?

Also, I didn't set up my user as 'pi', but haven't noticed any issues with this yet. What are the issues you experience with gamelists if you don't have this user configured?

Thanks!

[esmith13]

Glad the info can help!

I am using 64-bit. There are additional tweaks needed to make PS2 work on 64-bit (most places say you need 32-bit but I got around this on a Linux Mint x64 install previously). I haven't gotten to figuring out the steps to do the same in lubuntu yet. I am also a Linux novice and started with mint x64 cinnamon. Lubuntu is definitely lighter weight and faster on the same system I had mint on (an i5 dual core laptop that's about 3-4 years old).

As for the "pi" user - I did that so I can take gamelists from one of my raspberry pi 3 builds instead of rescraping all my roms in lubuntu. There are no issues with using a unique username. I'm just lazy.

The only tip I can think of in regards to mint-to-lubuntu switch over, perhaps first try just adding the lxde environment to your mint install and switch from cinnamon or mate (or whatever mint environment you have) to lxde to get a feel for it. You can always switch back later. If you decide to clean install lubuntu, first backup your /home/{username}/RetroPie/ folder as well as /etc/emulationstation/ and other RetroPie/Retroarch related items from /opt/

That's all I can think of for now.
Keep me posted on how you do with your build!

[movisman]

@esmith13

Hi there,

Cheers for the reply.

When I was first experimenting with Ubuntu I did get PCSX2 working on an initial build, but to be honest, the machine i'm using isn't really pokey enough to run it at full speed reliably. It is a quad core i5 with 8gb RAM, maybe 3 years old - but as it's a small box it only runs on integrated Intel HD4400 graphics and I can't expand - I think this is probably a slight bottleneck. I didn't spend too much time tweaking as ultimately i'm not massively worried about PS2 emulation. Maybe I will give it another try further down the line and try to tweak more settings to speed things up.

After messing about a bit, I switched to Linux Mint and concentrated on getting Dolphin, Reicast, Amiga and some of the other x86 emulators working well, and generally these have been successful. I already have a Pi 2 upstairs attached to a Picade but this obviously only runs ARM stuff but runs it really well.

Thanks for the tip about the environment, I might give that a try or run a Live USB to see what it's like first. I'm all good for backing up the relevant stuff as I did it all before on my Pi during various updates of Retropie, so that should be ok. And no worries about the username, I was wondering why you did that :) I will rescrape anyway on this system probably as I might try some of them with video previews - not sure yet. So I won't need to worry about permissions. Good to know though!

I will keep you posted how it goes - likely I will make the shift to Lubuntu while my build is in an earlier stage, otherwise I might leave myself with too much work. I don't think i'm going to end up using this machine for much else once it's finished, so as long as Lubuntu plays nice with all my hardware etc, it might be a preferred option as it's trimmed down and quicker, and possibly better suited to this ultimately. I'll be managing it remotely via SSH, SAMBA, VNC/Teamviewer, etc.

You mention retropie-manager, i've only just discovered this in the experimental packages but haven't tried it yet, is it worth using?

I assume you had no issues or errors at all when building/installing RetroPie from RetroPie-Setup, given that Lubuntu is based on 17.10 rather than 16.04?

Cheers!

[esmith13]

@movisman You are correct. No issues building/installing RetroPie on lubuntu 17.10 x64.

Retropie-manager's best features are:
remote monitoring of CPU usage, ram & temperature
Remotely add bios files and have them checksum scanned to verify validity.
Ability to quickly drag and drop roms to RetroPie (not recommended for huge transfers)

[damanbaird]

@esmith13 great! I almost abandoned this project due to the fact i got super busy with moving and had no idea when i would be able to get back to it.

[Kokomo]

@esmith13 Thanks for your reply (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12037/building-on-ubuntu-server-16-04/11). I've set it up with Lubuntu 17.10.1 without problems. Thanks!