Starting Concerto Digital Signage as a Systemd Service

Concerto Digital Signage is a great  open source program that can easily fit the needs of most small companies for digital signage.   It isn’t being actively developed any longer on their GitHub page unfortunately, but it’s a refined product that works great if setup properly.   I recommend using the pre built VM and hosting it on a Linux machine running Virtual Box.   I will eventually post on how to do that, but right now I wanted to give you a sample configuration of a service file for Concerto VM so that it runs automatically at system boot.   I run it as a headless VM on an Ubuntu system (as a Virtual Box VM) that is using the multi-user.target as it’s default starting run level.

For this example my Concerto VM is called “fdss” and the service unit file being created is called “fdss-vm.service”
Command to create the service unit file
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/fdss-vm.service

The text of the unit file is (you will need to change the “User” to whatever your username is):

[Unit]
Description=Autostart VirtualBox VM instance fdss
After=network.target vboxdrv.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=rflemen
ExecStart=/usr/bin/vboxheadless -s fdss
ExecStop=/usr/bin/VBoxManage controlvm fdss acpipowerbutton
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save the file. The next step is to enable it using the following command:
sudo systemctl enable fdss-vm.service

You can then reboot to start the service or start it manually with the following command:
sudo systemctl start fdss-vm.service

You can always check the status of the service using the following command:
sudo systemctl status fdss-vm.service

The output will look similar to below:

● fdss-vm.service - Autostart VirtualBox VM instance fdss
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/fdss-vm.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2023-10-15 06:04:53 EDT; 13h ago
   Main PID: 23261 (VBoxHeadless)
      Tasks: 27 (limit: 9218)
     Memory: 28.5M
        CPU: 50min 14.372s
     CGroup: /system.slice/fdss-vm.service
             └─23261 /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless -s fdss

Oct 15 06:04:53 rmftech.pi.hole1 systemd[1]: Started Autostart VirtualBox VM instance fdss.
Oct 15 06:04:53 rmftech.pi.hole1 vboxheadless[23261]: Starting virtual machine: 10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

That’s it!   You can now anytime you reboot the host machine Concerto should start silently in the background.

Thanks,
Rob