Automatic graphical boot-up

I've decided that it's time to get the Raspberry Pi to boot up with the VNC server running so that I could choose between logging in with the SSH protocol or go straight to the graphical interface. This wasn't too complicated. I followed the instructions on http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/.

• sudo su: Log in as root.
• cd /etc/init.d/: This is apparently the directory where startup scripts live.
• nano vncboot: Opens up a text file where the following commands were pasted. I don't really understand too much about what this is doing. The options in the VNC server are different from the ones I normally use, but I can't really tell what the difference is, so I'm going to assume for now that it's irrelevant.

  ### BEGIN INIT INFO
  # Provides: vncboot
  # Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog
  # Required-Stop: $remote_fs $syslog
  # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
  # Default-Stop: 0 1 6
  # Short-Description: Start VNC Server at boot time
  # Description: Start VNC Server at boot time.
  ### END INIT INFO
  
  #! /bin/sh
  # /etc/init.d/vncboot
  
  USER=root
  HOME=/root
  
  export USER HOME
  
  case "$1" in
   start)
    echo "Starting VNC Server"
    #Insert your favoured settings for a VNC session
    /usr/bin/vncserver :0 -geometry 1280x800 -depth 16 -pixelformat rgb565
    ;;
  
   stop)
    echo "Stopping VNC Server"
    /usr/bin/vncserver -kill :0
    ;;
  
   *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/vncboot {start|stop}"
    exit 1
    ;;
  esac
  
  exit 0
  

• chmod 755 vncboot: This makes the script executable.
• update-rc.d vncboot defaults: I think this is what enables the script to run at bootup. There was another command that the website instructed me to use that didn't work (update-rc.d /etc/init.d/vncboot defaults). My guess is that the reason it doesn't work is because I was in the particular directory so that the extra location information was extraneous and caused some sort of problem.

And that was pretty much it.

EDIT: I later noticed that this setup logged you in as root, and that's not such a good thing. I tried changing the user=root to user=pi and HOME=/root to HOME=/home/pi, but that didn't seem to work for some reason. So I went around and found another website that had instructions for logging in as pi: http://www.maketecheasier.com/setting-vnc-raspberry-pi/. The script is very similar, but it is different.

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          VNC
# Required-Start:    $local_fs
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start or stop the VNC server
### END INIT INFO
 
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
 
eval cd ~pi
 
case "$1" in
  start)
        su pi -c "/usr/bin/vncserver :1 -geometry 1024x728 -depth 24"
        echo "Started VNC server."
        ;;
  stop)
        su pi -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :1"
        echo "Stopped VNC server."
        ;;
  *)
        echo "Usage: vncserver [start|stop]" >&2
        exit 3
        ;;
esac
 
:

However, this gave me some problems, too. The connection was now getting refused when I tried to the run the VNC client from my desktop. After staring blankly at the code for a while, I changed the :1 to :0. That did the trick. I don't really know why it behaves like this, but it does. I may or may not change the resolution later.