I'm trying to set up cron to be an alarm on my box and to start playing a song or playlist using xmms. Nothing seems to work. I am on Mandrake 10.1 and all security is set to standard. After much trial and error and using this forum I got it to work by setting a script called 'alarm' with the following syntax:

#!/bin/sh
export TERM=xterm
mpg123 "<song_title>"

and my crontab looks like:

* * * * * <home>/alarm

First of all, yes the script is executable and the <home> and <song_title> are the actual directory and song title.

That worked fine but it will load mpg123 in xterm and I can't see it so I have to manually search out the PID using 'ps aux | grep mpg' and kill it manually.

I know I've done this on previous versions of Mandrake where my crontab was a very simple line such as: * * * * * /usr/bin/xmms "<song_title>"

Anyone know any ways of making cron start an X app?

By the way, as a test, I ran a cron job to do: * * * * * /usr/bin/xmms and redirected the output to a log file and got the following message: "** CRITICAL **: Unable to open display".

So, I thought to add localhost to the xhosts access control using "xhost + localhost". It was successfully added but still nothing.

Any help?

One thing to note is that "at" will not work either and I tried creating a cron job through webmin and it would not even let me access it. I clicked the link and there was nothing there, it didn't even change pages.

I've never done this but I'd guess that you at least need to export DISPLAY=whatever (just like you exported TERM).

good point, however I'm not sure if DISPLAY is a global variable that I can use and I don't know what to set it to if it is.

That's interesting, I wonder if cron runs independently of anything already running. If that's so, how do I tell cron to use the current display for a particular job.

By the way, I'm running KDE 3.2

When you export it that also sets it in bash, which is /bin/sh on Mandrake as on Mandrake's ancestor Red Hat. If you were using the original Bourne shell you'd have to split that up: TERM=xterm; export TERM

I just tested adding the following line to my crontab and it works:
Not sure what exactly you mean by this, but yes, the cron daemon runs independently of everything else (except init, of course). It kicks off your cron job, which then talks to the X server, which also runs independently of everything else (except init and possibly the font server if you're running that separately).

HTH.