Until I saw your post I'd never bothered trying firing up a processing script from startup. Anyway with Aptosid and xfce (bit of a niche distro I know, but closest thing I run to gnome, I prefer kde, fluxbox or even xfce) it kind of works for me (tested with toxis volumetric cup example at fullscreen). The usual xfce desktop does however appear briefly before the application script kicks in, but I can't see any problem in that? If I get a chance I might look at fluxbox and/or kubuntu, but I'm not installing gnome just to check it out.

Update fluxbox is the way to go see how to write a fluxbox script here:-
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title=Editing_the_startup_file

Works exactly as expected!!!

A further development is that while I got the linux32 application working from Processing 1.2.1 I lost RXTX/Serial functionality in the process. After a day of fighting/researching/attempting to resolve that issue, I decided to d/l 2.0a5. It works great from the IDE, but now when I run the linux32 application I get "line 4: java: not found". Not a terribly helpful error.

Ever see this one before and any suggestions as to how to resolve it? I have Sun's JDK6 installed.

On the Startup issue I'm looking into Ubuntu's startup script equivalent to the link you gave me for Fluxbox. I think therein lies my solution, but first I now have to figure uot why the stand-alone application is no longer worknig.

----  getting a tad frustrated...... 

Hey Monkstone, would you recommend I go to Fluxbox? If so, can you tell me what host Linux do you use with Fluxbox that gives you a clean executable with Processing 2.0a5? I'm not married to Ubuntu but do need my project to boot off a USB drive and launch the Processing application.

Well I only found your last post by accident ( blame the spammers, I've turned off following). I've just tested with fluxbox on kubuntu-11-04, and it also works for me there (as well as aptosid) so it should really work on ubuntu. Here is the startup script I used.

Well, on a hunch that the issue was path related I found that an application added to the Ubuntu Startup Applications list is given a default working directory of home/systemname. My program was stalling out because it couldn't find it's dependent files and the data folder in it's own directory. The solution was to enter the following to the Command field in the startup item properties: