Hey everyone.

I'm really new to Linux and I've been learning alot from reading the forums.

I've tried Mandrake, RH and Lycoris and I'm sticking with RH for now. (Altho if a new Lycoris comes out, I'm gonna try that.)

I've been able to get a lot of things figured out on my own and by researching, but I'm having a problem.

I have a program sucessfully installed in /usr/bin. I've set it up so I can run it in my user account just fine in a terminal window.

What I want to do is to have this program execute automatically every time I login, in a terminal window. (The program runs in a verbose mode, I want to see what it's doing.)

All the searches I do on this keep leading me to cron. But as I understand it, cron is only for things I want done at certain intervals. I just want this terminal window to appear with my program executing in my user context every time I login.

I guess what I'm really looking for is the Linux version of the Windows Startup folder.

Can anyone give me a point in the right direction?

Much appreciated.

i'm not exactly suer what you want to do... EVERY single time you open a terminal window you want to load a program? well, if that's really what you want to do then you would add the program to your ~/.bashrc e.g:

programname &

at the end of the file... but.. i'm really struggling to see what good that could do you...

if you aer looking at more of a newbie-ish kde (yuck) thing, then i think that kde does have a startup folder, but i've not sued kde for a long time... you could make an entry that ran

xterm -e programname

which would run the program inside a terminal window which would catch the output.

not sure why you end up at cron.. thats certainly not what you want, like you thought.

and pleeeeeeeeeeease avoid lycoris at all costs... for your sake..

I don't want this program to run every time I open bash.

My RH starts up, I log in, GNOME starts, and when the desktop appears, I want a terminal window with my program running in it. That's all.

If I open a new terminal window, it should operate normally.

If there is a KDE startup folder, that wouldn't help me with GNOME, right?

right, that makes much more sense. well what i do is have a ~/.xinitrc which contains:

root-tail -noinitial -g 120x20+10+300 /var/log/kernel /var/log/dmesg /simon/var/log/httpd/access_log -f
bbkeys -display :0.1 -i &
bbkeys -display :0.0 -i -rc ~/.bbkeysrc2 &
bbrb --random &
gaim --display :0.0 &
Eterm --display :0.1 &
exec blackbox
#exec gnome-session

this automaticaly sorts everything out on X including loading the window manager (blackbox here) on the last line. to do what you want, you'd insert that example i gave previusly into there somewhere. i don't use an X login manager tho, never bothered to find out how to do it if you do log in from X, i dare say gnome can do it.

gnome2 out june 20th i think.

Thanks so much for the help.

I'll try it out tonight.

Depends how you log in. Debian users will find that the script ~/.xsession is executed when they log in, users of any system that use startx will find ~/.xinitrc executed. I suspect that non Debian users who use a graphical log in will find ~/.xsession is executed.

The last line of the script should start your window manager.

http://david.us-lot.org/linux-config.php has a (long) example script.

should be the line you will want to add.

Just a quick thought, you might want to Give SuSE 7.3 or 8.0 a shot. Its wonderful!

As for your problem, I think the xinitrc is your best bet (as described in detail above)

? why should suse have the slightest effect on the issue here??? it's window manager based...

LOL acid. I didn't mean SuSE will solve the problem necessarily. I just think SuSE is a sweet distro and I figured I'd recommend it as a side note.

err ok.... well in that case...

BREAD! BREAD IS LOVELY! EAT SOME!

hehe Acid. Bread is essential to life! SuSE is also (in some respects) essential to being Sane!

Would that xinitrc thing be true with all aplications. For example if I wanted to start say Opera (which I don't, but just hypothetically...) would I place:
#
opera &
#
in the ~/.xinitrc file?

well yes... it runs everything.. why would you think it would be selective?

I was reading the post and everyone kept referring to having an term open, so I was wondering if it worked for X programs too, that's all.