Retropie menu component not opening

[Nozban]

Hi there,

I'm trying to install retropie on a Desktop computer running a minimal install of Debian 10 with retropie-setup folowing the tutorial. I managed to make emulationstation start and run but when I try to access some components of the retropie menu like "file manager" or "retropie setup" it will just bring me back to the desktop environement with mouse cursor as a cross.
I checked the retropie-menu folder and the "files.rp" are there but empty (0 bytes) I don't think this is normal and i don't get where it can come from.
I already tried re-installing retropie from retropie setup and reinstall all core package but it didn't change anything.
Retroarch is working from the retropie menu tho.

My guess is that i would need to install the core component from sources and not from binaries. Can I even do this ?

Thank for your attention.

[mitu]

@Nozban said in Retropie menu component not opening:

I checked the retropie-menu folder and the "files.rp" are there but empty (0 bytes) I don't think this is normal and i don't get where it can come from.

It's normal to be 0 bytes, they're just placeholders for the menu items.

I already tried re-installing retropie from retropie setup and reinstall all core package but it didn't change anything.
Retroarch is working from the retropie menu tho.

You need to run EmulationStation from a terminal emulator session (xterm, urxvt, gnome-terminal, etc), the shortcut that RetroPie installs already does that. If you are starting EmulationStation just by executing emulationstation itself, then some components will not work, since they need a text terminal to display.

[Nozban]

Ok thanks a lot, I see what was wrong.
In fact I was lauching emulationstation from the .xinitrc file because I wanted to avoid using openbox. But is seem not to be possible. To make it as clean as possible I edited my files like so:
/home/pi/.initrc

exec openbox-session

This will start an openbox session in X and trigger the autostart file that i edited like so:
/home/pi/.config/openbox/autostart

xterm -fg white -bg black emulationstation -fullscreen

This will lauch emulationstation in a black xterm terminal in fullscreen which is used to display the file manager or retropie setup.