Start a mono app fullscreen on a raspberry

Question

I written a small app to create a UI on a small 320x240 touch screen. so far the app seems to work well, but I was wondering if I can start that app after booting with startx BUT then in fullscreen without the taskbar! It should give the user a simple UI like a kiosk mode for a browser or something. I used VS2012 on a Win7 system using C# and windows forms. the exe is compiled on mono with ubuntu and works well on my raspberrypi :-)

Answer 1

you can do this. but first configure the Pi to boot on the console and not boot to the GUI (X).

then do the following on the console:

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

put these commands in the /etc/rc.local file:

export DISPLAY=:0
X -nocursor -s 0 -dpms&
mono /home/pi/YourApp.exe&

the above commands sets the environment variable DISPLAY to :0 which YourApp.exe will use to connect to the X server that was started on the second line.

the X server is started with an invisible cursor and will not sleep or blank out.

finally, you should set your App's main form settings as follows:

this.FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle.None;
this.WindowState = FormWindowState.Maximized;

i hope this helps.