Monday 28 February 2011

Autostarting programs on login in Ubuntu [How To]

If you want to start any program in your ubuntu installation whenever you login then you can just create a symbolic link in a special folder located at ~/.config/autostart/(that is somewhere inside of your home folder). The process is pretty easy and most of the guys out there might have already understood what you have to do but still I am writing the process for those who might get stuck on the way.

I'll demonstrate, as an example, how to autostart skype at the login time. As stated earlier, all you have to do is create a symbolic link to skype executable file as below. The command is typed in terminal(gnome-terminal).

ln -s /usr/bin/skype ~/.config/autostart

Btw, to find the location of any executable in linux, you can use the which command like below:

which skype

I hope this helps. Thanks. :)