Options tab missing from Startup Programs prefs dialog

Bug #705123 reported by jimav
32
This bug affects 6 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnome-session (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

This is a REGRESSION.

System->Preferences->Startup Applications
displays only one tab, the Startup Programs tab. The Options tab is missing (although documented in Help).

Since Options are missing, there is no way to save the current session or enable auto-session-save-on-logout.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: gnome (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.37-12.26-generic 2.6.37
Uname: Linux 2.6.37-12-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Jan 19 13:12:53 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Alpha amd64 (20101202)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LC_MESSAGES=en_AG.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: meta-gnome2

Revision history for this message
Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd) wrote :

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and making Ubuntu better.
I took the liberty of reassigning this bug to the package gnome-session-bin which includes Startup Applications.
The Options tab is present in Maverick, but is missing for me as well on Natty. (gnome-session-bin version 2.32.1-0ubuntu12)

affects: meta-gnome2 (Ubuntu) → gnome-session (Ubuntu)
Changed in gnome-session (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
tags: added: regression-release
Revision history for this message
jonaz__ (jonaz-86) wrote :

This is a real showstopper... im going back to ubuntu classic (gnome) until i can save session in unity!
I dont want to open 7 terminals and 2 browsers and alot of other apps every time i launch my computer and i dont want it running 27/7 because of the power bills.

Revision history for this message
jimav (james-avera) wrote :

Any recent progress or diagnosis?

This bug is still present in the official 11.04 release. It seems like a serious problem...

Revision history for this message
Russ W. Knize (rknize) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Diego Cavali (dmc-dmcwebd) wrote :

That is sad,, i really miss this option.
If I could program i would jump on it.
anyone out there got any similar solution?

Revision history for this message
jimav (james-avera) wrote :

What a mess. Decades ago, the X Window System came with a session-saving protocol which allowed apps to tell the window manager to restore them later. This served Unix and later Linux pretty good for a very long time. Then, a couple years ago, the X-server-based protocol was deemed unacceptable and support was yanked without notice form Gnome and replaced by a new protocol which no application supported, and a big Gnome update was released in that state. Of course, this meant that session-saving was completely broken. Over the past few releases, many (but not all) apps were updated to work with the new Gnome session-saving protocol, and by Ubuntu 10.10 session-saving was useful again. Arguably all that work was pointless to begin with, but now it is completely wasted because session-saving of any kind has been disabled.

We are now just like Windows, with only a manually-maintained list of "startup apps".

The post referenced in comment #4 says that sessions saved under one window manager or session type (unity, etc.) were not compatible with other session types. Well, then why not save sessions independently for each type of session? It would be better to force users to separately set up their session under each scheme than to not allow it at all.

Alternatively, make "save session" an interactive program which grabs the display and lets the user click on each window they want to save, and then creating new entries in the "startup programs" list just as if the user manually entered them. This might avoid all the problems with automatically saving all windows except those which shouldn't be...

Revision history for this message
jimav (james-avera) wrote :

If nothing is going to be done, then the documentation is wrong (it still copiously tells the user about the session-management tab, etc.).

So this is a bug, which if not fixed in the code, should be fixed in the documentation (to make it tell the truth).

Revision history for this message
Nestor Milyaev (n-milyaev) wrote :

Ubuntu, That is really annoying. Please put it back or provide an alternative way of saving user session in GNOME, or I will leave for Suse!

Revision history for this message
dino99 (9d9) wrote :

That version is no more supported

Changed in gnome-session (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Invalid
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