changing your shell will stop EmulationStation from starting automatically

[noon-ng]

Hi folks, I was doing my head in looking for a fix to convince my Pi to boot into emulationstation directly then it hit me.

Looks like the EmulationStation autostart feature needs the pi user’s shell to be set to /bin/bash.

The first thing I do on any new unixy environment is to install my personal scripts, which require zsh. So I didn’t even think of it and when I eventually rebooted my Pi I got greeted by a shell prompt even though everything else seemed fine!

[dankcushions]

yeah, retropie is essentially entirely bash scripts, so it's not going to run under zsh unfortunately. you'll need to write your own autostart script if you want to run emulationstation in isolation.

[BuZz]

This is expected behaviour. If you switch your shell to eg zsh you should be familiar also with autostarting stuff via ~/.zshrcor whatever your shell uses.

You can add something like this to it

bash /etc/profile.d/10-retropie.sh

Or just manually start things yourself. Note the script above basically launches our autostart.sh script but it does a check for tty and a couple of other things also.

[noon-ng]

@BuZz cheers, I’ll give this a try.

[Clyde]

The question I would ask myself in your place is if I'd rather do without or rewrite my scripts than trying to adapt many unfamiliar scripts that may break again with the next update.