HOWTO easily add Serviio as a start service in Mint Linux
For those who do not want to install Serviio to /usr and like to keep things clean and easy to use it is possible with Mint Linux to add serviio to the Menu or easily have it also work as a startup program. The Mint Control Centre does the job very nicely without having to create a script or run sudo to add a program from /usr as a startup service.
The caveat is that only the user profile that creates the Serviio startup will start Serviio and only upon their individual login. Which if you think about it is not a bad thing at all. That way you do not have to start serviio at a lower run level, and any of your login profiles can be set to do different things with different Serviio installs. It is entirely possible to install different instances of Serviio to different user login /home directories This is the beauty of linux….you can customize the way things are done to the nines!
With Mint all you do is right click on the menu and edit your “start menu” (in windows speak) here you can place a fully customisable link to where your /bin/serviio-console.sh and /bin/serviio.sh is …you can even add links to scripts that start multiple programs or multiple instances of the same program.
Though Serviio will not run multiple instances. It is entirely possible to launch serviio with the network monitor or other useful programs like the gupnp-tool's Upnp-AV-Control Point at the same time.
How to do all this is beyond the scope of this article but I strongly encourage you to learn simple bash scripting.
However if all you want to do is start Serviio when you log in as a specific user and not when the computer boots or other users log in then here is exactly how easy it is to accomplish with Mint Linux
Remember not to set a startup item to the serviio-console.sh …if you do you will get the little “where's Waldo” message. If you do want to launch serviio and the console as a service the only way to make this work is with a startup script that you create that will launch serviio.sh first then the console after a wait call.
You can easily create scripts to launch multiple programs in a timed sequence as a service in Linux. But it makes more sense to keep Serviio in the background as a service then adjust its settings with Serviio Console only when necessary.