[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Launching browser at startup

[From: Kalle Vahlman]

2006/9/18, Michael Wiktowy <michael.wiktowy at gmail.com>:
>
> On 9/18/06, Kalle Vahlman <kalle.vahlman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2006/9/18, tomas at oranginalab.com <tomas at oranginalab.com>:
> > >  We are developing a Flash application to run on Nokia 770 devices and
> we
> > > would like this application to be launched automatically when the device
> is
> > > switched on. How can we launch opera browser (in fullscreen mode) at
> > > startup? We've tried editing .profile and .ashrc but it does not work.
> Any
> > > help would be appreciate. Thank you in advance. Tomàs
> >
> > The usual (linux/debian) way of startup scripts are in /etc/init.d and
> > then a link to /etc/rc2.d (with name like "S99xx").
>
> Actually, that would be the place to put system-wide daemon/services startup
> scripts that have no UI.

And no user UI is launched there either in the desktop world (login
managers are not user GUI:s as they don't run as the actual user). In
fact, there is no "linux" way to start a user GUI which is not
specific to ones session manager, which are abundant and mostly
incompatible.

> There should be a script in there that runs the
> desktop manager and within the desktop manager there should be mechanisms in
> place to start things up in a particular users session so that all the
> proper environment variables and user contexts are set. The rc startup
> scripts are a very wrong place to put a command to start up the browsers in
> a user's desktop.
>
> .ashrc is also not entirely proper either as that is the script that is
> fired when an ash shell is started up to get a virtual terminal, AFAIK. Not
> something that happens automatically at Maemo desktop startup.

I would say it's not proper at all to launch GUIs in shell rc:s, but
AFAIK maemo-af-desktop doesn't have session management for this kind
of purposes.

> > As you'll want it to run as "user" not root, you might want to add it
> > to /etc/osso-af-init/ and edit real-af-base-apps to run the script so
> > you'll get the environment setup for free. You can look at the other
> > scripts there for examples.
>
> That seems to be the place but that script system sure is package manager
> unfriendly.

Of course. It's not designed (period ;) to be a general
user-configurable startup system.

> Other distros typically have a script that will call any script placed in an
> /etc/something.d/ directory. That way a .deb (or rpm or whatever) can add or
> remove their hooks into the main startup sequence without having to parse
> (and possibly corrupt) the main start script.

The osso-af-init scripts are called from /etc/init.d/ which are called
by init from the links in rc2.d. I only pointed out the af-init-dir as
it already is run as 'user' and has th environment set up already.

> Are there other mechanisms around like this or maybe some gconf-2 variables
> that can be poked that act on the session level rather than system level?

I don't know (of any atleast). Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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