Opening xfce4-terminal on boot and automatically running a terminal based application in interactive mode, on debian based AppVM's?

User Support
1

I have an application that runs interactively in the terminal inside of “myDebian AppVM”. I built the application from source, and the binary is named “myTerminalApplication”. The binary is located in /home/user/.local/bin/myTerminalApplication.

What I want to do, is when Qubes first boots up, I want the “myDebianAppVM” to automatically open up, then inside “myDebianAppVM”, I want the terminal application to automatically open up, and inside that terminal I want to run “myTerminalApplication” interactively.

So far, I have only gotten the Terminal to open automatically when “MyDebianAppVM” starts. To do this I created a desktop file in /home/user/.config/autostart/myTerminalApplication.desktop. The .desktop files that I tried looked like this

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.9.4
Type=Application
Name=myTerminalApplication
Comment=myTerminal Application
Exec=xfce4-terminal --working-directory=/home/user/.local/bin -e /home/user/.local/bin/myTerminalApplication &
OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
RunHook=0
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Hidden=true

and

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.9.4
Type=Application
Name=myTerminalApplication
Comment=myTerminal Application
Exec=sh -c '/home/user/.local/bin/myTerminalApplication; read'
OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
RunHook=0
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=true
Hidden=false

There is something wrong with the .desktop files, because only the Terminal opens up. No “myTerminalApplication” is run interactively. Just a blank terminal.

How can I accomplish opening a terminal automatically on boot, and running the “myTerminalApplication” automatically after terminal opens? To note, I amd trying this in Debian 13 AppVM as well as whonix-workstation-18 AppVM. Please help me?

2

As an alternative you could control everything from dom0. Create a dom0 script that runs what you want, something like:

qvm-run myDebianAppVM -- \
  xfce4-terminal \
  --working-directory=/home/user/.local/bin \
  -e /home/user/.local/bin/myTerminalApplication

And set it to execute however you want, for example in xfce session settings (it will start it on every login, not on every boot strictly speaking) / service / cron