What is supposed to start emulationstation?

larsks

I'm running RetroPie on a Pi Zero W. After an upgrade (apt-get update; apt-get -y upgrade) and a reboot, it was no longer booting into emulationstation, although everything ran correctly when starting it manually.

I looked around a bit...

There is no systemd unit for starting emulationstation
There is nothing in rc.local that would start it
There is nothing else in /etc that references emulationstation
outside of the /etc/emulationstation config directory.

...and there was nothing obvious in the logs indicating why it wasn't starting. I dropped the following systemd unit into /etc/systemd/system/retropie.service, which seems to work, although there is some sort of race condition at startup that means it has to restart once (hence the Restart=always):

[Unit]
Description=Start RetroPie UI
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=pi
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emulationstation
StandardInput=tty-force
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This seems to be working fine, but I'm curious what was starting
things up in the first place.

mitu

@larsks said in What is supposed to start emulationstation?:

This seems to be working fine, but I'm curious what was starting
things up in the first place.

It's the raspi-config option to Boot to CLI and autologin user that configures the auto-login of the user pi and the /etc/profile.d/10-retropie.sh script that starts Emulationstation.
You've stumbled upon an update to systemd that breaks the autologin set-up by raspi-config - reported in the forums in July (see here).
The solution is to either user raspi-config and re-enable the auto-login or use configure Emulationstation again to start automatically through the autostart module (see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/FAQ/#how-do-i-boot-to-the-desktop-or-kodi). You can remove your systemd unit and go back the the default behavior.

larsks

@mitu Thanks, that fixed it!

Also, for anyone else who ends up here, it's important that you run raspi-config as sudo raspi-config from the pi user. If you're already root and you run it it won't know which user to configure for autologin.