If you’re a Gnome 3 Classic (“Fallback“) desktop user, you may have noted that there’s no longer any visible way to get to your Startup Applications. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that after the upgrade to 12.04, Unity users get easy access to it via the system menu at the end of the panel.
While this oversight could do with correcting, you can still access Startup Applications by entering the following command in Run Application via Alt+F2, or in the terminal:
gnome-session-properties
While running this via the user menu would be ideal, you could make a desktop launcher for it, or even one for your panel which would mean one-click access.
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I’m still wondering why I can’t drag & drop applications into the startup applications window.
Not that I don’t know why it doesn’t work. It’s more that I don’t understand why they wouldn’t make it possible in some way.
Now I have to add the commands by copy-pasting from the Manu settings window, which is a pain.
Is there a way around this?
Good question, but as you’ve seen, it doesn’t support drag-and-drop. There are command-line ways to add stuff to Startup Applications, but I dare say the GUI method is quicker.
Thanks for the tip !
Too bad for some idiotic reason they decided to hide most of the useful applications from the selection…
Just remember that you need to have admin permissions to include some programs at start up. To do that, run
sudo gnome-session-properties
Hmmm… I only need to run the command, no sudo required. And I can successfully, check/uncheck items, as well as use the Add button to specify more startup programs. Are you saying that with some commands and programs, this will not work unless you invoke the sessions app as superuser? Or can’t you use it without sudo for some reason?
As far as I understand it, a program or script that requires administrative permissions (like ddclient, for instance) should not successfully start through gnome-session-properties unless the appropriate privilages are somehow included.
My problem is that I’m having trouble getting ddclient to load at startup no matter how I try to add it to the startup apps GUI. Still working on it…
OK, not disputing the logic, but here are some reasons it doesn’t work that way. First off, while you could be excused for thinking gnome-session-properties needs sudo, if you remember back to old Gnome 2, “Startup Applications” was under Preferences (apps that don’t generally need administrative privileges), not Administration (for those that do). Simply put, gnome-session-properties can be run by anyone.
As for getting it to run programs that do need sudo, that’s another matter (which running gnome-session-properties as sudo wouldn’t address, anyway). For those items, you’d need to add sudo at the beginning of the command, and when it launches, you’d be asked for your password. For those that need this, they will either fail to run without sudo, or be fairly useless, but you should be getting asked for the password(s) every time you boot up.
Some programs will need more than just sudo tacked on the beginning. An example is Firestarter (firewall) I have auto-loaded. “sudo firestarter” is not enough – “su-to-root -X -c /usr/sbin/firestarter” loads it correctly, and asks for the password every time it does.
You’re definitely right about the su-to-root -X -c
I got around to adding that to my ddclient entry in Startup Applications and I’m finally prompted for my admin password at startup. However, ddclient is still not actually loading properly; it doesn’t show up in system monitor and, most importantly, unless I load it manually each session, it doesn’t keep my ip address up to date.
I’ll have to keep digging on this one.
Thanks for your help.
Just amazes me that everytime the UBuntu crowd issues an “upgrade”, I have to spend 2 hours making it run everything.
So far as Unity is concerned, best I can say is “Klutzy.”
Like a Mac wannabe menu from 15 years ago.
User efficiency goes down the drain.
If Classic fallback were not there, I would not be using UBuntu anymore. What were they thinking?
Regards
I’m so fed up of ubuntu, I once read an article called something like – killing linux- where it would become more and more like windows, so as now it is complete with spyware and now that useful things like Turning the Sound Down When the Phone Rings by a panel applet is gone, I’m not mucking about anymore bye bye ubuntu
nb can’t even comment unless I agree to divulge all my personal details