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belacqua
Asked: 2011-01-21 14:32:54 +0800 CST

How can I delay dropbox from starting, but not disable it?

  • 772

When I log into my user account on Ubuntu 10.10, there is a unsatisfying delay before my system becomes usable. Even launching a terminal, I have to wait a few seconds before the bash prompt appears. During this start-up period, the top process seems to be dropbox. I'm not sure what it's doing exactly (functionality is still fine as far as I can see), but I do know it really doesn't need to be doing it while I'm waiting for desktop to appear. (This is the standard Ubuntu with Gnome desktop, by the way.)

What I would like to do is to be able to have a static or even dependency-based delay for dropbox to start. It would be nice if it waited for, e.g., 10 minutes, or for my browser tabs to load and a typing pause. Then it could churn away on file status or cache-chewing, and I would be happy.

Is there a way to do this? Thanks!

startup

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    First, disable Dropbox from starting on login.
    Open up the DropBox preferences and uncheck Start Dropbox on system startup:

    enter image description here

    Now we will manually add Dropbox to the list of applications that run on login.
    Open up System ➜ Preferences ➜ Startup Applications and click on Add to add a new entry.

    Use Dropbox for the name and bash -c "sleep 10m && dropbox start -i" for the command, and then click Add to save it.

    enter image description here

    That's it, now Dropbox won't start until 10 minutes after you have logged in.

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  2. I found myself having the same problem recently and the way I fixed it is a mixture of the two answers, the reason being that Dropbox would rewrite the launcher dropbox.desktop entry in ~/.config/autostart/ whether I had it ticked to start on startup or not. So here are the steps you can take if you find yourself in a similar situation:

    • Untick the box to start on system startup (see first pick on Onalemon's answer)

    • Create a file that will be your custom application launcher in ~/.config/autostart/. You can use

      gedit ~/.config/autostart/theNameOfYourCustomLauncher.desktop.

    Whatever you want to call it, just don't call it dropbox.desktop

    • paste in the following code using your own settings for the Name and the X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay

      [Desktop Entry]
Name=NameOfYourCustomLauncher
GenericName=File Synchronizer
Comment=Sync your files across computers and to the web
Exec=dropbox start
X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=15 
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=dropbox
Categories=Network;FileTransfer;
StartupNotify=false

    All that is left is for you to create a new startup launcher: I'm using the Gnome Shell, so I can just go to Applications ➜ System Tools ➜ Startup Applications or run gnome-session-properties on terminal and fill in the text boxes:

    Name: NameOfYourCustomLauncher
Command: dropbox start -i
Comment: YourComment

    And that's it! After a restart it worked just fine.

    • 6

  3. Delaying autostart with inbuilt delay option

    This one works without the need for a script or sleep. Open your dropbox autostart entry in a text editor:

    gedit ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop

    Append the following line to the file:

    X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=foo

    where foo is the time in seconds you want to delay the application launch by, for instance

    X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=60

    would delay the application start by one minute.

    Save the file, relog and you should see the effects.

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