Some people had asked to keep this thread going so here is what I've found so far. (Note That I'm using GNOME and GDM so I started with GDM. There is, no doubt, something for equivalent KDE) For those who want the short version, I still don't have it figured out yet but I now think that the autostart of the xdg directory *.desktop files is called from within gnome-session. I found this page: http://library.gnome.org/admin/gdm/2.26/gdm.html This describes how GDM executes a number of scripts during the login process: Init PostLogin PreSession Xsession The Init script is located in /etc/gdm/Init/Default and has nothing to do with PA which I sort of already knew as PA gets started during the login process not before it The PostLogin script would be called would be called /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default if one existed but on my system it has been renamed to Default.sample and is empty. The PreSession script is located in /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default and this also has nothing to do with PA. Section 5.3 of the html doc above says "There is also an Xsession script located at <etc>/gdm/Xsession which is called between the PreSession and the PostSession scripts. ...This script is run as the user, and it will run whatever session was specified by the Desktop session file the user selected to start." Looking at this script you can see that it is indeed this file that starts the gnome-session. The web page above has a section called Autostart Configuration which says "The <share>/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow directory contains files in the format specified by the "FreeDesktop.org Desktop Application Autostart Specification". Standard features in the specification may be used to specify programs should auto-restart or only be launched if a GConf configuration value is set, etc. Any .desktop files in this directory will cause the associated program to automatically start with the login GUI greeter." # ls -g /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow -rw-r--r-- 1 root 2250 2008-12-18 18:31 at-spi-registryd-wrapper.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 2570 2008-12-18 18:31 gdm-simple-greeter.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 4835 2008-12-18 18:31 gnome-mag.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 4440 2008-12-18 18:31 gnome-power-manager.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 2302 2008-12-18 18:31 gnome-settings-daemon.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 4986 2008-12-18 18:31 gok.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 1333 2008-12-18 18:31 metacity.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 6449 2008-12-18 18:31 orca-screen-reader.desktop -rw-r--r-- 1 root 171 2008-11-17 15:52 plymouth-log-viewer.desktop (The -g is just to keep the lines shorter) So, as you can see, no pulseaudio.desktop here. My conclusion so far is that pulseaudio is started by autostart and that the /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop files are called from within gnome-session. I need to research gnome-session next. Steve -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines