This post is going to be short but i decided to write it after checking the Awesome Window Manger wiki. There were four or five solutions to the autostart problem but only one of them worked for me so I decided to make a quick post about it for when I forget how to do it in a few weeks.
The application that I was trying to autostart was the wicd-client, Wicd is a network-manager which I use to connect to wifi. Since this is my laptop I wanted the wifi to start automatically. There is also a wicd-daemon but that starts with the normal init.d scripts so that was fine. In Gnome, KDE and Xfce4 there is a autostart directory but in some of the tiling window managers there is no such thing.
Awesome Window Manger is a very fast and highly scalable window manager and is controlled completely by a rc.lua script.
This script is located in you users home directory in .config/awesome/rc.lua
- r00t@666:~$ ls .config/awesome/
- rc.lua
If the file is not there you can copy it from the default location. This is always a good idea to do so if you mess up the file you can copy back over the original.
- r00t@666:~$ cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome/
So now if there are any applications we need to autostart we can add them to the very end of our rc.lua file.
The syntax that worked for me is : awful.util.spawn_with_shell(“name of program here”)
So in my situation I just issued the following command:
- echo 'awful.util.spawn_with_shell("wicd-client")' >> ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua
Once I did that and rebooted I had the wicd-client widget in my task bar and I was auto connecting to the internet like I wanted.
