[Lazarus] Running an app on boot

Ed Murashie emurashie at proengineered.com
Wed Feb 1 23:41:09 CET 2017


I want to thank everyone for their comments and suggestions and give a summary of what worked for me.  
First my background and hardware I used. I am an electronics engineer with experience in C with PIC and Cortex M3/4 ARM processors and windows with Visual Studio. I had two weeks to learn enough Linux, BeagleBone Black and Lazarus to create a demo of a graphical thermostat using a BeagleBone Black Rev C and the 800x480 5" SEEED Studio LCD with resistive touch panel.  What I finally did was the following:

1. Read most of Exploring BeagleBone by Derek Molloy. A great book that starts with very little knowledge of Linux, electronics and the BeagleBone and yet you wind up learning all the different type of programming methods including QT & GTK+ and interfacing to hardware.
2. Learned Lazarus and familiarized myself with Pascal which I learned 20+ years ago by watching the excellent School Freeware Pascal and Lazarus YouTube videos also at http://www.schoolfreeware.com/Free_Pascal_Lazarus_App_GUI_Tutorials_With_Example_Code_.html 
3. Update the BeagleBone operating system to the latest Debian Jessie with the LXQt desktop.  This is well documented at http://beagleboard.org/getting-started  
4. In Lazarus, I set the Form properties BorderStyle to bsNone, the WindowState to wsMinimized and the FormStyle to fsSystemStayOnTop and built a simple application with buttons, pictures, labels, etc. Clicked on Build to build my program.
5. In LXQt I set the startup application to run on boot by going to Preferences, then LXQt Settings, then Session Settings and finally Autostart. Clicked Add, gave the startup a name and then browsed to the Lazarus executable I built in step 4 and left the Wait for system tray box unchecked.  When I rebooted the system powered up into the application with no log on, task bar, etc.

Next I am going to explore a stripped down operating system, X11 and fpGUI to see if I can speed up the bootup time.

Thanks again, everyone who responded to my inquiry,
Ed




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