Running Raspbian through RetroPie

[kapnin]

Is it possible to run Raspbian through RetroPie? I have tried to dual boot it, but I don’t want to have to configure it again. I have heard people running things like XBMC as an application, but does it work with Raspbian? And if it does, how would I go about doing this? Thanks!

[cafarellidigital]

I think you may be confused. Raspbian is an operating system (Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi), whereas XBMC is an application. So the answer is, most likely, no. I’d be surprised if you could open an OS like Raspbian as a virtual environment on a Raspberry Pi.

In fact, RetroPie uses Raspbian as the base OS, and then adds on applications and tweaks from there. So, RetroPie is built inside of Raspbian.

Think of Raspbian as Windows or OSX, and RetroPie as a program running on that OS, like Firefox, Photoshop, or VLC. You can’t open Windows from inside of Photoshop, just like you can’t run Raspbian from inside RetroPie.

[cacophony555]

As stated above RetroPie is already running on top of Raspbian.

If you’re looking to have a dual purpose retro gaming setup and media center there are existing solutions that you may want to consider:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=59590
http://www.recalbox.com/

There are also ways to modify RetroPie to support launching into XBMC but it would take some work.

[kapnin]

I know that, but it is possibe to get to the regular raspbian and still have RetroPie on it?

[cacophony555]

[quote=92013]I know that, but it is possibe to get to the regular raspbian and still have RetroPie on it?[/quote]

RetroPie has regular Raspbian, just with a few packages uninstalled (that you’re free to re-install and maybe don’t need anyways). It would help if you actually said why you want to dual boot.

But yeah there’s plenty of info on dual booting a pi, and from your first comment it sounds like you’ve already done it in the past:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dual+boot+raspberry+pi&btnG=–%3E&gws_rd=ssl

[Robert Wilson]

I think I know what he is trying to say. I got same question. Let me put it this way. How do you start the raspbian desktop after running retropie. I used the retropie SD card image to install. Is there a command that I can type to go to the desktop after the system has booted into retropie and I exit out of that.

Sorry for the noob question. I’m new to this stuff as well and saw his question and I had same thought. So I registered so I could jump in.

P S loving being able to play the old games.

[herbfargus]

When you say raspbian perhaps you mean the lxde desktop- command to install that:
sudo apt-get install lxde
Then once you get it installed you need to go into sudo raspi-config and change the boot sequence to boot into a terminal- that way on boot it will still go straight into emulationstation. Then when you want to use the desktop you press F4 to get into the terminal from emulationstation and type startx.

see this video for a step by step:

[Xenotome]

Sorry for digging up this old topic.

I’ve followed the video, but when I use startx either via command line or the .sh script in Emulationstation this is what I get:

[attachment file=”startx.jpg”]

Any idea what causes this?

[Xenotome]

Nevermind, had to use sudo apt-get update first before installing LXDE.

[Author]

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