Sean’s Blog

While I was setting up Timevault, I noticed something really weird. When I added a application to start on login (System->Preferences->Sessions), it showed up as added, but was gone after I logged out and logged back in.

So when I ran it (gnome-session-properties) through the terminal, everything added fine, but I got this error in stdout:

Suddenly it all made sense. Somehow, the permissions on the autostart directory got messed up and it wasn’t allowing my to write to it. So the quickest way to change it is through the command line using chown and chgrp. Initially you can see the permissions on where the start up files are kept (~username/.config/autostart) are owned and writeable only by root.

Here is how we change that :

You must have sudo permissions to change file ownerships.

Here are some pages for chown and chgrp for more detail on those commands.