Headless Operation

PulseEffects is a GUI application requiring X and Gtk. To run it on a headless machine, for example a Raspberry Pi used to play back music, Xvfb can be used instead of a full X session:

Xvfb :1 &
export DISPLAY=:1
pulseeffects --gapplication-service &

Running a VNC server could give access to the Xvfb session. The following script can be used to start/stop Xvfb and PulseEffects. /usr/local/bin/pulseeffects-xvfb:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ "$1" = "start" ]]; then
	pkill Xvfb
	sleep 1
	Xvfb :43 -screen 0 1024x768x16 &
	sleep 3
	export DISPLAY=:43
	pulseeffects --gapplication-service
fi
if [[ "$1" = "stop" ]]; then
	pulseeffects --quit
	pkill Xvfb
fi

An appropriate systemd service can be stored in .config/systemd/user/pulseeffects-xvfb.service:

[Unit]
Description=Pulseeffects inside Xvfb

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/pulseeffects-xvfb start
ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/pulseeffects-xvfb stop
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Now the service can be started and enabled so PulseEffects is run on user login.

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user start pulseeffects-xvfb
systemctl --user enable pulseeffects-xvfb