As you may be aware I am a relatively recent convert to Ubuntu. As such I am still tweaking my desktop to my liking (Who am I kidding, I don’t think I’ll ever finish tweaking it).

I was previously running Gnome (Ubuntu’s default) Desktop, except with XFWM as by Window Manager, as I have never liked Metacity (Gnome’s default WM). Today, I changed my default session (from the “Options” menu in the GDM — the graphical login screen) to XFCE, as many of the Gnome features I don’t use anyway, and I have always liked XFCE, it was on my desktop in my Gentoo day’s (that or Openbox).

Everything seemed to work fine. There were a few things I needed to configure because they were handled by Gnome application previously, but on the whole most things were very similar. The first issue I noticed was I had no sound (There is almost always music playing on my machine, as it should be). After some investigation, I discovered that ESD hadn’t started:

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$ ps x | grep esd
5981 pts/1    S+     0:00 grep esd

A quick search led me to a post on the Ubuntu Forums which wasn’t directly very helpful, but it indicated that, at least I wasn’t the only one. And it also inspired my solution.

I wrote a quick script to start ESD, but only if it isn’t already running (thanks to the problem encountered in the aforementioned post)

~/bin/startesd

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#!/bin/sh
APP="/usr/bin/esd"
ARGS="-nobeeps"
if [ `pidof $APP` ]; then
    #Do Nothing - already running
    return
else
    $APP $ARGS&
fi;

Then, by adding an entry to run that script into XFCE’s (new to me, but apparently not so new) “autostart-editor”

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$ xfce4-autostart-editor

or “Autostarted Applications” in the settings menu.

I had sound, without having to manually start ESD each time.

The only other configuration I need to get round to doing it configuring my multimedia keys… but that can wait ‘till some other time.