Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Autostart application on desktop session startup (GNOME|KDE)

I've being needing a way to launch applications on the start of a user desktop session for a academic lab management system I've been toying around with for the last few weeks. I've search the web, asked on the propper IRC channels and most of what I had found wasn't enough for my needs: gnome-session can only register app launching for earch user and I needed something system wide.

I do not even remember where I've found info about it but the freedesktop.org has a spec for just this kind o thing: Desktop Application Autostart Specification. THe main idea is to just place a .desktop file in a specific directory: /etc/xdg/autostart/.