Sessions manager not remembering settings

I had this amazingly infuriating problem up until a short while ago, whenever I edited the programs to boot at start time, the sessions manager (System -> Preferences -> Sessions) immediately forgot my changes, without an error box or anything. After a tip from the forums, I ran it in the terminal, which pinpointed the problem, the system couldn’t write to a folder called autostart in the folder .config.

Fair enough, so I changed permissions on this folder to be writable by all. Still no luck.

After about a month of being bloody pissed off with this arrangement, but unable to fix it, I happened across a tip that suggests deleting the folder and recreating it. So simple, but it might just work….

And it did! So if you’re having the same problem, heres how to go about fixing it.

1. Open a terminal and run the command “cd .config”

2. Now, check the permissions of the files in this folder, run “ls -l”, this lists the properties of the files within the current folder. We’re interested in the properties of the “autostart” folder.

3. Find the line corresponding to the autostart folder, it will be the top one, or very close to it, now, after the series of letters ( e.g rwrx–r–rw etc.) it should list your username as the owner of the folder. If you see ‘root’ here, this may be your problem, you can remedy it by running the following command,

“sudo chown username autostart” (Replacing ‘username’ with your username obviously).

4. Try the sessions manager again, if it doesn’t fix your problem, we’ll move onto the next step.

5. Once again navigate to the .config folder, this time we’re going to delete the folder and recreate it, so run the following command, it will do both operations at once.

“sudo rm autostart;mkdir autostart”

6. This should fix the problem, so give sessions manager a go again.

Let me know if this works for you, it drove me crazy for a while, hopefully you found this post before it does the same to you!

BTW - I’ve typed this whole post without looking at the keyboard once, my own very blunt way of teaching myself to touch type! Its a pain in the arse, but I’ll let you know if it works!

Xorg running wild

Ok…hardy isn’t running fine for me…

Thats a picture of a graph of my CPU usage.

The high bit was compiz.real or Xorg, I’m not sure, ‘top’ and System Monitor tell me different things, hogging my CPU big time. It happens at random intervals and is really annoying.

It has to be a compiz problem cos if i run ‘metacity –replace’, the usage goes back to normal, as can be seen on the graph.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any known solution?!

I should mention that I’ve got an Intel integrated graphics card - the 945gma I believe, so unfortunately, the nVidia fixes posted don’t really help!

—–EDIT——-

Just thought I’d stick up some new screenshots of what the top command outputs, and what the system monitor outputs

How to Upgrade to Hardy

I spotted this great post on the Ubuntu Planet, it should answer any questions you may have about upgrading! Take a look

Happy Hardy Day!

Happy Hardy Day everyone. Its that time again, the new Ubuntu release is currently being installled on hundreds of PC’s worldwide. Get your copy here, and enjoy!

conky

I just set up conky on my Hardy machine, its as simple as can be, a quick “sudo apt-get install conky” did it for me.

The cool thing about it is that you specify exactly how it works, by creating and editing a file in your home directory called .conkyrc , this file is a little hard to understand so you’re better to (like I did) use a pre configured file, I’ll post mine here, along with a screenshot. It makes your desktop look seriously l33t!

.conkyrc