Getting the “fortune cookies” back in the Linux Mint Debian Edition terminal

Some weeks ago I installed Linux Mint Debian edition after being a loyal and happy user of the Linux Mint main edition for some years. It was a very nice experience but something was missing… in the main edition, every time you open a terminal you are greeted by an animal, which has something more or less funny to say. I always liked that, it’s part of Linux Mint for me. However when I opened the terminal in my freshly installed Linux Mint Debian Edition I saw the following:

No one greeted me. So I decided to ask on the forums. Gladly there is a solution for this (thanks to äxl for the answer!). You can simply run:

gconftool -s -t bol /desktop/linuxmint/terminal/show_fortunes true

Alternatively you can open the graphical configuration tool with “gconf-editor”, navigate to that path and change the value by hand. And then there they are again, my beloved “funny greeting messages”, “fortune cookies” or whatever you want to call them. And notice what really important wisdom my terminal has to share with me this time:

Autostarting applications in Linux Mint Debian Edition

A few days ago I finally made the step to switch from Linux Mint main edition (Linux Mint 10 was getting old) to the all new Linux Mint Debian Edition Release Candidate with the new Cinnamon desktop. It’s been great so far.

However I was really missing a feature of the main edition. There you could simply right click on a menu entry and say “Launch on startup”, which has been the most convenient way to add an autostart that I’ve ever seen. Browsing the settings and the web I at first didn’t find a way to autostart applications. I found lots of descriptions involving files and directories that don’t seem to exist in my Linux Mint Debian Edition. Well enough babbling.

Solution

Simply run:

gnome-session-properties

You can do this in the terminal or with Alt + F2 (gnome do). There you have a list of all your startup applications and you may add applications by specifying their command (like: “thunderbird” or “firefox”) but you may also remove startup applications. This looks something like this:

This should work with all Gnome based desktops (Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Mate, Cinnamon), I haven’t tested it though. It’s fairly easy but embarrassingly took me long enough to figure out, so I figured that it’s better to blog about it and maybe save somebody else some time.