Chromium Full Screen on Boot with Dragonboard 410c

When working on my embedded capstone project, I spent a lot more time then I wanted trying to get our Dragonboard 410c running Linux ( Linaro 4.9.39 ) to boot to Chromium full screen. I decided to write this for hope someone in the future can save time parsing together all the various sites and forums I had to get this information. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: For our project we had the luxury of no risk of other people using it outside its intended use so to make our life’s easier we did everything as root so please adapt if you can’t afford the same luxury.

First open Chromium

This instruction needs to be done with the desktop GUI. Open up a terminal and run sudo chromium --no-sandbox to see Chromium open as root. The --no-sandbox is you saying “yes Chromium, I understand the risk”. This step is needed as you can only see the preference file for Chromium under the user which has even opened Chromium before.

Turn off your desktop GUI

Now we are going to save a lot (~200 MB) of our precious 1 GB of RAM and turn off the desktop display manager. To do this open /etc/X11/default-display-manager and delete the line /usr/bin/sddm inside.

• sddm== Simple Desktop Display Manager

Reboot and you should be greeted with a command line instead.

Remove logging in

Open /lib/systemd/system/getty@.servic and change:

• ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear %I $TERM

to

• ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear -a root %I $TERM

Have Chromium fit full screen

• Open ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences ( this is why we needed to open Chromium once before ). Replace the window_placement section with:

"window_placement":{"bottom":480, "left":0, "maximized":true, "right":800, "top":0, "work_area_bottom":480, "work_area_left":0, "work_area_right":800, "work_area_top":0}

This really just needs to match the screen size being used which for us was a 800x480 screen to adjust to your needs. Also pro tip, use a text editor you can just search for window_placement .

Have Chromium run on boot

Now all that is left to do is somewhere in your ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, or /etc/rc.loacl add this command.

xinit /usr/bin/chromium http://www.InsertYourURL.com --kiosk --no-sandbox --disable-popup-blocking --disable-infobars --disable-session-crashed-bubble --disable-tab-switcher --incognito --disable-overlay-scrollbar

• xinit /usr/bin/chromium <URL> will open Chromium in a window and the URL argument is the site it will load up.
• --kiosk special flag from Chromium designed for full screen mode. Helps takes care of most things related to full screen.
• --no-sandbox is for running Chromium as root.
• The rest of the flags are used in various ways to have it so you don’t see all the annoying things like “restore last session?” or the side scroll bars. I found most of these options here.