Launching chromium from emulationstation

[carlosricardocm]

Hi,
I installed Chromium using an customised deb package (customised to allow viewing netflix).
Chromium is installed without errors, but when I try to run it from emulationstation, I get the following message:

Failed to put Xlib into threaded mode.
Gtk: cannot open display

I have a script called chromium.sh in RetroPie/roms/chromium which contains the following line inside:
chromium-browser

Also I added the following to the file es_sytems.cfg located in /opt/retropie/config/all/emulationstation/es_system

<system> <fullname>Chromium</fullname> <name>chromium</name> <path>~/RetroPie/roms/ chromium</path> <extension>.sh .SH</extension> <command>bash %ROM%</command> <platform>chromium</platform> </system>

Any thoughts?
Thanks

Pi Model or other hardware: 3
RetroPie Version Used (eg 3.6, 3.8.1, 4.1 - do not write latest): 4.3
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie websit

[mitu]

@carlosricardocm Chromium needs an X server running - basically a classic desktop environment. You must run it from Pixel or start it in an X session, see this thread for instance - https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/11866/how-can-i-start-x11-only-for-a-single-application

[EctoOne]

There's a custom script to install chromium in the extra repository https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/8/. Maybe you can can install your version after you installed that.

[wmoecke]

@carlosricardocm said in Launching chromium from emulationstation:

I get the following message:
Failed to put Xlib into threaded mode.
Gtk: cannot open display

In order to fix that, you need to follow this tutorial.
In the end, I only had to run the two installs below:

sudo apt-get install xinit
sudo apt-get install matchbox-window-manager

I have a script called chromium[dot]sh in RetroPie/roms/chromium which contains the following line inside:
chromium-browser

After installing xinit and matchbox-window-manager, I've modified my Chromium launcher script exactly as instructed in the aforementioned tutorial.

Also I added the following to the file es_sytems.cfg located in /opt/retropie/config/all/emulationstation/es_system
<system> <fullname>Chromium</fullname> <name>chromium</name> <path>~/RetroPie/roms/ chromium</path> <extension>.sh .SH</extension> <command>bash %ROM%</command> <platform>chromium</platform> </system>

In my file, I've got:

  <system>
    <name>chromium</name>
    <fullname>Chromium Web Browser</fullname>
    <path>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/chromium</path>
    <extension>.sh .SH</extension>
    <command>startx %ROM% > /dev/null 2>&1</command>
    <platform>chromium</platform>
    <theme>chromium</theme>
  </system>

Note the <command> line: I've entered startxfollowed by the %ROM% parameter (which will get the script name) then an extra > /dev/null 2>&1 (this is to omit the output from the script commands, keeping a clean console).

Update:
Initially I had xinit in the command line to invoke the script from a window manager environment. A couple days after, while managing modules and plugins (throwing apt-gets at random, for no reason whatsoever), I ended up somehow breaking xinit as in it would no longer start the X-Server. So I found a workaround by replacing xinit with startx in the <command> line, and all was good again.