Sunday, November 16, 2008

Launching an application at the begining of the desktop session

I've been searching for a way to launch an application when the user logs in the desktop for quite a while now. After a few weeks looking into gconf I've stumbled on a simple and powerfull solution to my problem: the Desktop Application Autostart Specification.

The solution is quite simple: just create an .desktop file at /etc/xdg/autostart/ and the application will be launched when the desktop session in any freedesktop.org compliant desktop.