Retropie asks for password every 1st game I start. Annoying when running in arcade cabinet w/o keyboard.

[77slevin]

I've been asking around on Reddit , and every Mint forum I can find, but get suggestions that are completely irrelevant or suggesting I change my complete setup, pretty much useless. Here's the thing: I find my Raspberry 3 that runs my arcade cabinet getting a bit bogged down under the emulation load. I had an i5 Intel NUC lying around and decided to replace the trusty Rasp with the NUC in my cabinet.

I installed Linux Mint v19.2 MATE, because I'm most comfortable with Mint (and no I won't change to Debian lite, Ubuntu, or any other OS, I'm a Mint user), setup VLC to play a splash screen in accordance with the theme of my cabinet and installed Retropie on top, auto-starting when booting Mint. Everything works swimmingly, except for the fact that when I choose a ROM to play, I need to enter my password one time, every follow up game starts without asking until I reboot / restart Retropie. As you can imaging this is quite annoying running in a cabinet without keyboard. Is there a way I can give Retropie elevated rights from boot up, so it won't ask for the sudo password? Security wise it's no problem, after setup my machine will only be on my local network without access to the internet. Can someone help me? Or paraphrasing Princess Leia: 'Help me, Retropie, you're my final hope!'

[xFJSx]

Hi,
this happend to after an update.
found a solution. In this post
asking-for-retropie-login-on-boot
Usually the user is "pi" and the password is "raspberry"
Hopfully this will help you to.

[mitu]

@xFJSx I don't think this applies to this post, since the problem doesn't happen on a Raspberry Pi.

@77slevin Running a game doesn't need root privileges, I suspect you're auto-starting RetroPie wrong. Did you follow the installation guide for Debian or did you use other method to install RetroPie ?

[77slevin]

@mitu

I did follow the guide you mentioned meticulously, twice even, thinking I missed something the 1st time. Someone on some other forum suspects my choice of screen filters (Bloom effect and interlace) might be the cause of the asking for elevated rights. I'm going to disable these and report back. (And you have no idea how many "useful tips" I've got pertaining to Raspberry Pi, while I cleary stated I'm on Mint. Comprehensive reading is a lost art)

[77slevin]

@77slevin said in Retropie asks for password every 1st game I start. Annoying when running in arcade cabinet w/o keyboard.:

@mitu

Nope, not the reason. After disabling the filters, I still get the password request.

[mitu]

The only part of the runcommand (which runs the games) that uses sudo is the CPU governor switch. Try adding your user - that auto-logins and runs Emulationstation - to the sudoers configuration file so is able to run sudo without being prompted for password.
Type sudo visudo to start editing the file and make sure you have an entry with

<user> ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

but replace <user> with your actual username.

[QuarterSwede]

@mitu I had the same issue. It would always ask for a password on first game only. I followed the guides to no avail and found my problem was where in the file I put the user. It must go at the end of the sudoers file after the #includedir line. Once I did that it loaded without asking for permission. I doubled checked by rebooting and running emulationstation again and it loaded as expected. Hope this provides some clarity. This StackExchange thread is where I finally figured out my error.

[rael_gc]

As from time to time I still have the sudo password prompt hitting me back on a system where I can't change /etc/sudoers and this is one of the first Google results: sudo password will be requested if you changed the runcommand configuration to set the CPU governor to something that is not default. It'll request password during game launch and after the game ends (to restore previous value).

So, solutions are, like described above, add entries to /etc/sudoers or change runcommand config to not touch CPU governor.