Friday, September 10, 2010

Ubuntu autostart applications configuration

Recently, after kakku was showing off some kewl KDE stuff..i've been wanting to try Kubuntu..
I've been a Gnome user all along..I did use KDE a long time ago..but it failed to impress me at that time.
The last time, I tried to have both Gnome and KDE environments on my desktop, it was a big flop.
I had some autostart applications configured on Gnome that would be launched immediately after I login.
These autostart applications were cairo-dock, gdesklets and couple of other notification scripts that I hacked up.
However, these were messing up the desktop look and feel and I tried to put all this into one single shell script and have them launched if I was logging into the Gnome environment only.. I lost interest in KDE and that idea fell apart.
Today, I've decided to fix this problem and turns out, it is not that hard to fix it!
Both Gnome and KDE use a ~/.config/autostart directory to configure autostart applications.
Each of the applications has .desktop file where all the configuration is stored.
Open each of these files and add the line
"OnlyShowIn=GNOME;"
(without the quotes, ofcourse) and voila..u have it..this will make sure these applications will autostarted only in the Gnome environment.
If you want the applications to be autostarted only in KDE, change the line to
"OnlyShowIn=KDE;"
For any other desktop envrionments, please refer to the "Registered OnlyShowIn Environments" section at http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html

1 comment:

Casey Flinspach said...

So if we have no autostart in .config/... we have nothing starting on start up?