Hello I am new to Antix 15 which is great, I have tried out a few other distros. I use it on an old Dell Inspiron to take on holiday and it is brilliant. However I have done something (not sure what) that has prevented the automatic start up of DropBox. I followed the clear instructions of Dolphin Oracle on setting up DropBox including entry in start-up part of icewm file, but I noticed that DropBox had stopped starting automatically (although it will start from the applications menu). So I went back to the Dolphin Oracle video and found the startup tab in icewm was now completely blank, so I retyped the following as before:

#!/bin/bash

dropbox start

... but it doesn’t start! I looked in the /home/matthew folder and found a file called startup.disabled which I renamed with zzz in front to disable that, which made no difference. As recommended I have searched the forum and used the prefix"site:antix.freeforums.org" in google with my question as you advised, but still not found the answer. I suppose I could do a re-install but would have to set up all my passwords etc and really I would rather learn how to overcome this problem so that I become a more competent user.

Thanks, Matthew

Do you have a ~/.desktop-session/startup file?
If so, please post the contents here.

My guess is that you have set up the dropbox startup via /etc/desktop-session/startup (global session under control center) and later on saved a ~/.desktop-session/startup file (user session under control center). The user session file (~/.desktop-session/startup) overrides the global file to allow a per user configuration.

Therefor you should be able to get it exactly as it was via
1) copy /etc/desktop-session/startup to ~/.desktop-session/ (cp /etc/desktop-session/startup ~/.desktop-session)
NOTE: I cannot recall at the moment but you may need to set the execute permission for ~/.desktop-session/startup to make it work (chmod +x ~/.desktop-session/startup
2) if you have only one user anyway on the system (or they have all the same startup requirements) you can remove the ~/.desktop-session/startup file (rm ~/.desktop-session/startup)

I also understand that drop box also follows the xdg autostart system, so you could also edit ~/.desktop-session/desktop-session.conf (user) or /etc/desktop-session/desktop-session.conf (global) and set the XDG_AUTOSTART="false" to XDG_AUTOSTART="true". Dropbox should autostart then, as well as other xdg autostart apps such as wicd and clipit.

Dave thank you, I am just posting to to acknowledge and say thanks and that I am rather busy at present so will post back when I have studied your solution and applied it. Matthew

i am having trouble posting but heard you have to put a / etc

Hi Dave thanks for the message and after some tinkering about I hope this SLASH-ETCETERA workaround will get posted! Let's see....

On reflection I think I caused my problem trying out the different desktops and themes available, but liked IceWM best and went back to it. At one point I got stuck in Herbstluftwm and couldnt get out by switching off, so thought harder and ran firefox from a tiny window and googled my way out by typing desktop-session-exit, and pressing F1 when I logged back in to get to IceWM. At some point I lost the Antix icon in the bottom left corner and a Debian icon replaced it (I don't mind about that!)

I searched with SpaceFM Filesearch and I do not have have a ~/.desktop-session/startup file. I wasn't sure what"~" means but I think it could be Root. Using Rox as root I could look in the Root folder but there was no startup file in it, and none in the root/desktop folder, even after i had run your command to copy (cp SLASH-ETCETERA-SLASHdesktop-session/startup ~/.desktop-session)

There are 5 desktop-session folders:

(1) SLASH-ETCETERA-SLASHdesktop-session This contains"startup" shell script 83B -rwxr-xr-x owner matthew-matthew 2015-03-31 and also five other files namely desktop-defaults.conf desktop-session.conf file_compare wallpaper.conf wallpaper-list.conf

(2) /usr/local/share/live-filesSLASH-ETCETERA-SLASHdesktop-session This only contains"startup" shell script 83B -rwxr-xr-x owner root-root 2015-03-31

(3) /usr/local/lib/desktop-session This doesn't contain a"startup" file but has 12 files
desktop-session-exit.py desktop-session-file-locations.sh desktop-session-logout desktop-session-restart desktop-session-save-gpid desktop-session-slim-update.sh desktop-session-update-wm-menus desktop-session-xdg-dirs.sh desktop-session/first-run-script desktop-session/lib-desktop-session.sh desktop-session/lib-popup-window.sh desktop-session/startup-dialog.py

(4) /usr/local/bin/desktop-session This is a shell script 14.3K -rwxr-xr-x owner matthew-matthew 2015-06-14

(5) /usr/share/desktop-session This contains a folder /wm-menus and two files first-run-script and first-run-text

I tried copy SLASH-ETCETERA-SLASHdesktop-session/startup to ~/.desktop-session/ but this didn't make any difference. Then I had a thought, and I went into each of the 3"startup" files I had and did"edit as root" and added the line"dropbox start &" at the end - I'd read somewhere on this forum about the importance of the"&" at the end of the line. I didn't change anything with XDG_AUTOSTART.

And it has worked, thank you. Several reboots have been successful. Can I tidy things up by removing what I copied into root, or will it not hurt to leave it?

Many thanks,

Matthew