Having installed Peppermint 3 I wish now to customise it by specifying the startup applications.
The website http://peppermintos.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5683 provides an apparently simple method of adding entries to the .config/autostart file.
Mine already contained Dropbox so I added Thunderbird using the terminal command: cp /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop ~/.config/autostart/
Here’s what the autostart folder looks like now: keith@D505 ~ $ ls .config/autostart
dropbox.desktop thunderbird.desktop
Thunderbird is now listed in the Preferences/Desktop-Session-Settings but does not autostart, although Dropbox does.
For some reason it’s the “%u” on the “Exec=thunderbird %u” line of the .desktop file that’s stopping it from starting.
Run:
gedit ~/.config/autostart/thunderbird.desktop
make it read:-
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Thunderbird Mail
Name[en_US]=Thunderbird Mail
Comment=Send and receive mail with Thunderbird
Exec=thunderbird
Icon=thunderbird
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=Application;Network;Email;
My thunderbird.desktop file is mostly in foreign tongues, but I removed the %u from the offending line and it worked a treat. When using Ubuntu 12.04 I found that the %uwas necessary, so it’s odd that Peppermint (which seems to be based on Ubuntu) doesn’t want it. But who are we to argue?
Is there any reason why I can’t remove all the repeated lines in many languages, keeping just the English ones - or even replace the whole lot with your code?
Perhaps “interesting” is the wrong word, but the articles certainly helped to put things into perspective, even if I still don’t understand very much.
I found it most disappointing that the Standard contains such poor grammar and forms of expression that it is often difficult to extract the meaning. But then I was brought up proper.
Thanks for your help, Mark.
I get what you’re saying about the hard to grasp “language” … but then it’s at least the correct “terminology”.
That document isn’t really written as a tutorial for learners … more as a standard reference document for programmers, so will tend to use their language.
There are better “tutorials” online.
%u
Ok, as I understand it …
(and bear in mind I’m NOT a programmer)
Let’s say you select multiple exported email files in pcmanfm (File Manager), then right-click them and select Open with>Thunderbird … pcmanfm will read the thunderbird.desktop file at /usr/local/share/applications and realise it has to execute “thunderbird %u” … the %u tells it to treat the file locations as a list of “single URL’s” … so a new instance of thunderbird should be spawned for each file.
This doesn’t really apply to the .desktop we created in autostart, as it’s not being passed a file in the first place (and never will be) … though technically (AFAIK) it should just have ignored the %u when not being passed any further command line arguments.
Yep; point taken. And upon a quick re-read, I couldn’t find the bits that read badly so perhaps I was simply misguided by the technicality of it.
Your explanation of %u is very helpful - would that all technical writers were!
