Midori without a Desktop

Midori is a lightweight browser using the WebKit rendering engine and it is a default browser that is found in Raspbian. This is a quick quide to start the Midori browser from the command line without a desktop manager.

To start the Midori in full screen mode, use the following command:

xinit /usr/bin/midori -e Fullscreen -a http://domain.com

However it is not in full screen mode, it just fill up about quarter size of the screen. To fix this problem, Midori must run on a windows manager, for example matchbox, which is is a free and open source window manager for the X Window System. Matchbox is mainly intended for embedded systems and it is very lightweight.

sudo apt-get install matchbox

To hide the cursor, install unclutter, which will hide your mouse pointer if there is no activity.

sudo apt-get install unclutter

Startup script

Create the start script in /home/pi:

#!/bin/sh
xset -dpms              # disable DPMS (Energy Star) features.
xset s off              # disable screen saver
xset s noblank          # don't blank the video device
unclutter &
matchbox-window-manager &
midori -e Fullscreen -a http://domain.com

Now run xinit ./startscript and the Midori window should be fullscreen.

• Press CTRL + ALT + F1 exit back to command prompt after the program (Midori) is running.
• Press CTRL + ALT + F7 return to Matchbox Window Manager

You might need to install x11-xserver-utils in order to make the xset -dpms and xset s off to work correctly.

sudo apt-get install x11-xserver-utils