touchpad - Syndaemon won't start as startup application

I've added the following line into my startup applications:

/usr/bin/syndaemon -i 0.5 -d -K

but syndaemon is never running when I log in. I always have to execute the command manually from the terminal, at which point it works normally. My other startup applications work fine. This issue occurs in both gnome and unity.

I'm using ubuntu 14.10 (issue occurred in 14.04 as well). I doubt my hardware matters, but I'm on a lenovo yoga 2 pro.

Ideas?

I am not sure what Syndeamon is or should do, but it could very well be that it is started too early, and crashes because the desktop is not fully loaded yet.

What you can do is to add a small pause of 10-15 seconds to the start up command.

To do that:

• Open the automatically created .desktop file in ~/.config/autostart (drag it over a gedit window)



• Replace the line, starting with

  
  

  Exec=
  

  
  

  change it into:

  
  

  Exec=/bin/bash -c "sleep 10&&/usr/bin/syndaemon -i 0.5 -d -K"
  

You can experiment a bit with the time to optimize it.

Explanation

Some commands break if you add them to startup applications, because they need a fully loaded desktop to run succesfully, and Startup Applications runs the commands too early.

Touchpad- related commands are in that category, and then you need to add a little break after startup to make it work.

Since Startup Applications creates a .desktop file in ~/.config/autostart to run the startup command, you need the "regular" syntax to add a complicated command to be used in a .desktop file, which is in this case:

/bin/bash -c "sleep 15&&syndaemon -i 0.3 -d -K"