Starting Jungle Disk on boot in Ubuntu

Jungle Disk is a great tool. If you use it with Ubuntu though, you might have a little trouble getting it to run automatically. It comes as an executable file in gz or deb format for Ubuntu, but there is no clear way to set it up at startup.

Adding it in System > Preferences > Startup Applications doesn’t properly load it into the panel, which confuses it and causes it to constantly pop back up when you try minimize it. This was driving me crazy. What’s more, when shutting down or rebooting, Jungle Disk doesn’t cleanly exit and leaves a few session files laying around. This causes an error about multiple copies running when you try to run it on boot.

Fortunately I was able to work around these quirks. I’m happy to report that Jungle Disk is loading and working as expected now. Here is what I did:

  1. Put the following into a text file:
    [code=bash]
    #!/bin/bash
    if [ -f ~/.junglediskworkgroupinstance ]
    then
    rm ~/.junglediskworkgroupinstance;
    fi
    if [ -f ~/.com.jungledisk.workgroupservice.status ]
    then
    rm ~/.com.jungledisk.workgroupservice.status;
    fi
    sleep 30;
    /usr/local/bin/junglediskworkgroup;
    [/code]
  2. Make the file executable with “chmod 755 /path/to/file” or something similar.
  3. Add the new command to System > Preferences > Startup Applications.

You might change the sleep period for more or less time as needed. 30 seems to work well for me. And I’m sure there are better ways to handle this. If you have a any recommendations, let me know.

6 Replies to “Starting Jungle Disk on boot in Ubuntu”

  1. Nice. It helped.

    With 3.0 and the various different products, I thought I’d post the changes necessary to use Jungledisk Desktop instead of Jungledisk Workgroup. All three file names (the two status files and the executable) change:

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ -f ~/.junglediskinstance ]
    then
    rm ~/.junglediskinstance;
    fi
    if [ -f ~/.com.jungledisk.service.status ]
    then
    rm ~/.com.jungledisk.service.status;
    fi
    sleep 30;
    /usr/local/bin/junglediskdesktop;

  2. Does anybody else have the same jungledisk problem i am having? I’m also running the app on Ubuntu. I’m going to try out the shell script you provided…

    But the other issue I am having is that it seems like it’s not updating the list of files in my Jungledisk. I believe that when I ran the .deb installer I did so using sudo, maybe I need to reinstall w/o using sudo?

    Anytime I open up my jungledisk folder I see the same list of files that were there when I installed jungledisk. I hit Refresh but nothing changes.

    1. I haven’t seen this problem before. Have you tried opening the Jungle Disk Activity Monitor and using the Cached Data > Remove Cached Directories/Files options?

      1. hmmm that sounded like a good idea. i had not looked at those settings. i just gave it a try and it didn’t fix the problem. it’s weird. one thing is certain, i need to dig into these settings further and work on it a bit more. i love love love jungledisk but if it’s going to be like this…ugh.

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