Hello.

I'm trying to set up an OEM installation of Ubuntu Dapper (using the "alternate" CD), and I've run into a problem. I want to start glipper (an enhanced gnome clipboard) each time gnome starts up, for every user that is created. Since this is an OEM installation (I'm not actually creating the user accounts), it's not possible to go around editing every user's ~/.xinitrc and adding "exec glipper &" (or something like that) to them.

How can I set it up as a global setting (i.e. for all users) so that glipper will start automatically no matter who logs in, or what users are created? This must be done in such a fashion that the end-users will not have to actually do anything in order to make this work.

Thanks in advance.

--Dane

Have you looked at /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and/or ../gdm.conf-custom ?

If you put a file called .xinitrc in /etc/skel with whatever you want to start when X is started, then whenever a new user is created that file will be copied into their newly created home directory.

This means that the individual users will be able to not start glipper if they don't want to (by deleting the line from their own .xinitrc) without affecting other users, but this may or may not be a good thing.

It may be worth mentioning that there are other files in /etc/skel, such as the default .bashrc for all new users. You can edit these files to meet any other requirements that you have.

I hope this helps
--Ian

Thanks, both of you, for your suggestions!

Here's the solution that I found based on what you told me:

Place a file called .gnomerc in /etc/skel with the following contents:

It took me a bit of digging to find out that I needed to do that (instead of the .xinitrc or .xsession file; putting the command there prevented the X session from starting). Basically, there's a file called /etc/X11/Xsession that sources the contents of /etc/X11/Xsession.d/, and one of the files in there, 55gnome-session_gnomerc, sources ~/.gnomerc if it exists. Somehow (I'm only a novice scripter, so I don't really understand it), the commands sourced through the above processes are then executed, so all one really has to do is make sure that the commands to be run when gnome starts end up in ~/.gnomerc.

Thanks, everybody!

--Dane