xdg .desktop files don't recognize "fluxbox"

[Phil Dibowitz]

Binary package hint: gnome-keyring

The XDG & GDM environment will nicely start gnome-keyring-daemon and nm-applet for me in Gnome, XFCE, and a variety of others, based on the OnlyShowIn parameter in the /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop files.

I tried to add FLUXBOX to that line for gnome-keyring-secrets.desktop and nm-applet.desktop, but it doesn't seem to recognize that as a valid value.

The only work around is to start my own gnome-keyring-daemon inside of my ~/.fluxbox/startup which doesn't have access to the login session, and thus requires an additional entry of the password, not to mention, it'll stay running after the logout session, thus creating a leak of old gnome-keyring-daemons.

I should be able to add fluxbox the lines look like:

OnlyShowIn=GNOME;LXDE;XFCE;FLUXBOX;

But, that does not work.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: gnome-keyring 2.92.92.is.2.30.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.33-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-22-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun May 16 13:52:32 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-keyring

[Phil Dibowitz (jaymzh)]

I found a better work-around for anyone else running into this problem. The '-s' flag to gnome-keyring-daemon will find the existing instance and print out it's information, so this:

eval `gnome-keyring-daemon -s`
export GNOME_KEYRING_CONTROL
export GNOME_KEYRING_PID

inside your ~/.fluxbox/startup will give you access to the already-running keyring instance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, the issue seems rather a fluxbox one though

[Phil Dibowitz (jaymzh)]

Rather than mark invalid - can you instead just change the project to fluxbox? Or do I have to file a new bug?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

reassigning the bug to the fluxbox component now

[Jim Ramsay (i-am)]

Fluxbox is not a full "Desktop Environment" -> It is only a "Window Manager"; and therefore it does not conform to the XDG Autostart standard. The ~/.fluxbox/startup is the only thing that is executed on startup, so it is the appropriate place to start daemons that are not started automatically by the parent process, be it GDM, KDM, Slim or startx.

Thus Phil's workaround ('gnome-keyring-daemon -s' in ~/.fluxbox/startup) is indeed an appropriate solution.

Another possible solution is to run a 3rd-party app like lxsession (Part of the LXDE: http://lxde.sf.net) that can already take care of XDG Autostart initialization, and instruct it to run fluxbox as the Window Manager.

There are a few specific things that could probably be done to improve Fluxbox itself and its integration with an ever-increasing number of /etc/xdg/autostart/* services:

1) Find out why, as stated in the original bug report, fluxbox's ~/.fluxbox/startup does not have access to the login session.

Now, I'm not exactly sure what "login session" means here, but if it has something to do with consolekit or policykit permissions not propagating down to ~/.fluxbox/startup, this would be a real problem! It would imply that fluxbox itself (and therefore any application started by fluxbox, say via the fluxbox menu) will also have no access to this "login session".

2) Write or find some code (maybe some kind of desktop-agnostic XDG autostart script?) to deal with things in /etc/xdg/autostart properly, and change the default ~/.fluxbox/startup script to run this.

It would probably be nice if this were a separate (ie, not part of fluxbox) script or application, as it could be shared by many different non-DE WMs (openbox, wmii, etc)

[Paul Tagliamonte (paultag)]

Hey Phil. I've created a new project ( fbautostart[1] ) to deal with this issue. I just got around to writing it today. If you would like to test, the code is still very very pre-alpha, but I've gotten it to work.

I'm going to close it out against Fluxbox, but hopefully we can solve the issue with another program ( in the true UNIX way (tm ) ).

Thanks for using Fluxbox!

[1]: https://launchpad.net/fbautostart

[Paul Tagliamonte (paultag)]

Hey there Phil.

If you could please test fbautostart from my PPA[1], and let me know if this provides expected behavior. Keep in mind, this must be placed in the fluxbox autostart file.

Feedback very much welcome.

[1]: https://launchpad.net/~paultag/+archive/staging/+packages