dear all, been waiting for some spare time on my hands to try out all the helpful posts sent some of you past week, to solve the above problem stated in the subject line.
[have had a rough week: ethernet hub short-circuited and died, loads of other screwups on my machines and with gnulinux, while facing increased workload] anyways, the good news is that i spent some time calmly reading man pages of several commands. here's how i've got some X applications (xcalc, firestarter, etc) to boot after *any* user logs-in through xdm, despite *whatever* environment is chosen: kde, gnome, etc etc. step 1: firestarter can only be run by the root. so i 'man visudo' and added the relevant users to sudo firestarter without root password. step 2: 'xhost +localhost' is required as a prerequisite to let firestarter launch without displaying X display errors. step 3: created a small shell script that does the above two steps for me. step 4: dump this shell script, in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ note: make sure the actual command to start your applications, such as xcalc, firestarter, have the '&' appended to them, so they run as background processes. not doing this has an intersting effect: i can make a sophisticated pc log-in a user into runlevel5 and only run a dumb calculator! not even the desktop, taskbar, menu, etc appears. a great way to make a gnu/linux appliance. i got the idea of dumping this script into xinitrc.d after poring through the commands of the xsession script in /etc. i noted a part here that goes to this directory and runs any scripts in this directory. step 6: test your setup, log-in through various accounts, using KDE, gnome, and what have you, and the applications will launch. my sincerest thanks to the following people who responded generously and patiently to my queries, (list in no particular order): sandip bhattacharya, supreet, raj mathur, shuvam mishra, bhaskar dutta. the above steps are a compilation of the various suggestions they offered. *** known limitations: 1) for any new user added to the computer, the root has to visudo and add that person to the list of users of the root-password protected firestarter. [applicable for other generic root-privileged applications as well] 2) a user could simply close or quit this running application. wonder how to respawn it or disable this ability. 3) raj recommended adding the application startup script in /etc/init.d. noted that such a shellscript already exists in this directory, added by firestarter's installation, and that does not work. raj's suggestion is that doing so would no longer require sudoing and mucking around with the sudeoers list. *** for those who wish to create auto-run applications for a particular user in a particular environment, here's what you need to do: step 1: create a shell script that launches the required applications. step2: place this script in the /home/whoever/.kde/Autostart/ directory. note: if the user is using kde. you have to find similar places for other environments. thanks guys, for all your help, and hope others who wish to auto-run applications can use the above steps. :-) LL _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
