Autostart failure on Mint 17/Cinnamon 2.2

[bdvore]

The autostart doesn't work on linux Mint 17 with Cinnamon 2.2.16 whereas the manual start from the desktop menu works fine.

I'm not sure it 's a bug in the Indicator Stickynotes, because I have a strange but fully satisfying workaround.

The issue disappears when I rename the autostart desktop file. Removing all the '-' characters is enough (from /etc/xdg/autostart/extras-indicator-stickynotes.desktop to /etc/xdg/autostart/extrasindicatorstickynotes.desktop).

Changing the .desktop file name in a future release may help other users.

Thank you for this useful application.

[Umang Varma (umang)]

Hi,

Thanks for your bug report. That's bizarre. If this really is an issue only with Linux Mint, you should report a bug to Linux Mint.

Since it looks like the Apps Review Board doesn't seem to be approving apps, I don't have to follow their packaging system and will change this in the next release.

Thanks for the information.

[Umang Varma (umang)]

This should be fixed in the latest ppa version.

[Eric Ding (ericding-alum)]

It turns out that this happens because Cinnamon intentionally blacklists all .desktop files which include "indicator-" as a way of avoiding issues with (some?) Ubuntu indicator applets. I filed an issue on github for cinnamon-session, and that's how the developer explained why it's been implemented this way. A workaround is being introduced of a whitelist that users can set to manually override the blacklist.

So what this means, I think, is that indicator-stickynotes.desktop is still being blacklisted as of Cinnamon 2.6.7, but there should be a workaround for this in the near future; and arguably, the name of the desktop file should not be modified in the ppa to take out the hyphen(s), since the issue is Cinnamon-specific.

cf. https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-session/issues/58

[Umang Varma (umang)]

Thank you for investigating that, Eric! That does seem odd, but I can imagine that this was their best way to work around some weird behavior.

Instead of waiting for Cinnamon to upgrade (the update may not reach the current version of Linux Mint and Ubuntu), I can change the name of the desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart/ so that it does not have a hyphen. Since the debian package just creates a symlink to the desktop file in /usr/share/applications/, I just have to modify the name of the target file.

Once that commit lands in a current version of Linux Mint and Ubuntu, I can look at automatically adding indicator-stickynotes to the whitelist.

[notklaatu (klaatu)]

It's not just an issue with indicator-*.desktop files.

In my ~/.config/autostart dir, a user has:

-rwxrwx--x Jul 7 2014 cairodock.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Jul 22 09:38 dropbox.desktop
-rw-r--r-- May 26 19:27 extras-indicator-stickynotes.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Jul 21 22:21 indicator-stickynotes.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Sep 20 2014 keyboard-backlight.sh.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Mar 5 06:05 mintwelcome.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Mar 5 06:05 plank-1.desktop
-rwxr-xr-x Jul 12 2014 plank.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Jul 21 22:20 redshift-gtk.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Apr 28 21:39 rescuetime.desktop
-rwxrwx--x Jul 7 2014 tapDiable.desktop
-rw-r--r-- Jan 7 2015 VidyoDesktop.desktop

All of these were added from the cinnamon Settings > Startup Applications.

these actually autostart:
dropbox
plank
rescuetime

all others do not. Some have been told not to start in the Startup Applications GUI, but some have been told to start but will not:

I'm guessing the executable bit has something to do with it; maybe it's not getting set under certain circumstances.

[notklaatu (klaatu)]

Ignore my comment. I just noticed that this tracker is specific to indicator-stickynotes.

My apologies, I'll file my bug elsewhere :-)