I am still faithfully running WhatPulse. However, when installing it on a fresh Ubuntu install on my laptop, I encountered that “good old” problem again where WhatPulse starts too soon. That is, after adding WhatPulse to the start up applications, it starts before the notification-area-applet. This is a bit problematic since WhatPulse resides there by default.

In the old days, I used to fix this by adding in this small script that would sleep for 30 seconds before starting up WhatPulse. Instead of adding WhatPulse directly, I would then simply add that script to the start up applications and voila.

#!/bin/bash

sleep 30
/home/ward/.whatpulse/WhatPulse

The last line there is obviously the way to my WhatPulse executable.

This method worked, or I do not remember an occasion anyway where it did not work. Upon inspection though, it looks a bit hacked together (excusez-moi le mot, it feels odd to call three pretty standard lines a hack). So I rewrote it a bit to be more foolproof.

Here is how I have things set up now:

  • A folder ~/.whatpulse where I extracted the WhatPulse binary

  • A script in that folder wp.sh

    #!/bin/bash

while [ -z `pgrep notification-ar` ]; do
    sleep 5
done

# Change the following line so it matches the location of your WhatPulse file
/home/ward/.whatpulse/WhatPulse

    And that script added to my start up applications.

Note that I look for notification-ar instead of the full name due to it appearing like that in ps -e output.