languor.us

KDE for all its eye candy and general slickness really sucks on some basic points. One of these is with auto-starting programs upon login. Suggestions to get this working almost always involve having the use the command-line or following a prolonged series of steps for a task which should ideally involve no more than a few clicks. Usually, most people suggest the following as a solution even to newbies:

1. Open up Konqueror. Navigate to your home folder.
2. Click on View. Select Show Hidden Files.
3. Look for a folder named .kde and open it.
4. Look for a folder named Autostart and open it.
5. Right click inside Konqueror. Select Create New and Text File.
6. Give the text file the name of the program you would like to autostart.
7. Open the file using Kate or the text editor of your choice.
8. Type #!/bin/bash on the first line.
9. Type the command to launch your program along with any necessary switches.
10. Save the file.
11. Right click on the file, select Properties and the Permissions tab.
12. Finally, check the is executable box and click OK to complete the process.

Are you fucking kidding me? I know that user-friendly Linux is still something of an oxymoron. However, this is really pushing it. Convinced that there had to be a better solution, I decided to google some more and eventually found that the recommended procedure is actually the following:

1. Open up Konqueror. Navigate to your home folder.
2. Click on View. Select Show Hidden Files.
3. Look for a folder named .kde and open it.
4. Look for a folder named Autostart and open it.
5. Click on the K Menu icon and navigate to the program that you would like to auto-start.
6. Drag the icon for said program into the Konqueror window and select Copy Here when prompted.

And that's it! No text editors. No jargon. No code. If you bookmark the Autostart folder, then it becomes an even easier process very similar to that in Windoze. That said, the whole idea of placing the Autostart folder inside a hidden folder smacks of idiocy.

Update:
A commenter - Mike - has suggested that installing kcontrol-autostart is the way to go and this is indeed the case. While it might not support drag and drop or provide short-cuts to easily add programs to the autostart list, it is still simple and intuitive enough to be very useful.

To install it, either type sudo apt-get install kcontrol-autostart in a terminal or search for the term autostart in your package manager of choice. It looks like it might be a recent addition as it is only at version 0.1.

Once you've installed it, the next hurdle is to find it :S The autostart component is a part of the KDE control centre - KControl - which is apparently not good enough for Kubuntu, as it is not accessible via K Menu. To run KControl and thereby access autostart:

1. Click on the K Menu icon and select run.
2. Type kcontrol and click OK to launch it.
3. In the navigation pane on the left, select KDE components and choose Autostart Applications.

To make things easier, you might want to create a desktop / K Menu short-cut to kcontrol.