I am trying to get a headless Ratflector going on a RasPi for a meshnet for out local ARES-RACES group. I can get D-Rats loaded, but it must run from a desktop, and user name and password is required to get the RasPi to that stage. I know that Asterisk runs with out desktop or passwords, abut I know that is a whole different story. Can anyone give me a push in the right direction? Thanks. Sorry to take up the time on the board.

So a key point here is that Asterisk is a daemon and is intended to be run from the background. This was designed into the program rather than forcing a desktop.

The following Google cache entry has a patch that claims to modify the ratflector  to daemonize but I haven't tested it and it may no longer work due to age (2011)

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7OhOZ-m0EbIJ:www.wt0f.com/2011/08/wa7fw-ratflector/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

The other option is to setup your pi to auto log in, and set  the drats program to launch from a desktop startup script.  Exact methods to do this vary by pi distribution to pi distribution and desktop environment to desktop environment so I would refer you to that group to get more specific details