HOWTO: Disable or Enable Gnome Session Startup Applications from Command Line

- As usual I am not responsible for you screwing up your install by using these instructions the wrong way! -

So I looked around, and just couldn't find out how to do this without using the GUI (Which by the way is SYSTEM->PREFERENCES->SESSIONS)

It looks like by default session startup options are located in the following directories:

/usr/share/gnome/autostart/
/usr/share/autostart/
/etc/xdg/autostart/
and then every user can have their own autostart options located in
~/.config/autostart/
(the above translates to: /home/<username>/.config/autostart/ )

So if you want to disable a startup option from command line you would just open a terminal window and remove or as I perfer - rename - the startup options corrisponding .desktop file. For example, to disable the check for new hardware on every login for every user - you could do this:

- Open a terminal window
- do the following:

Code:
sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/jockey-gtk.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/jockey-gtk.orig
This will rename the jockey-gtk.desktop file (which is the New Hardware Detection Application in Ubuntu) to jockey-gtk.orig - which will disable it from starting up for all users when they login. Which was something I needed to do on a current project.

Anyway - I looked around, and I found methods for disabling startup services using the "sysv-rc-conf" package, but it was much harder to find any information about how to disable Gnome Session Startup applications without using the GUI - which was not an option for me in this case.

Hope this helps others!

Enjoy!

Shane Menshik
D2 GLOBAL INC
http://www.d2global.com