The Great "Startup Applications" Mystery

[nevart1]

Catchy title? Well unfortunately this will probably prove to be a boring question, but since there are possibly some security or performance issues at stake here, maybe we'll get some more interesting answers than anybody would expect... so here we go anyway...

What I noticed in the Startup Applications dialog is that there are some instances where applications seem to be being called twice. This is the sort of nonsense that is typical in Windows, but not what I expect to see in Mint. The culprits are:

NETWORK - manage your network connections
POLICY KIT AUTHENTICATION AGENT - Policy kit authentication agent
SCREENSAVER - Launch screensaver and locker program

There is also a mysterious little application in there called:

NO NAME - No description

And I don't think it is being excessively paranoid to be a little concerned about an application with a name like that and an oh-so-helpful description like that which is being initiated at start-up automatically without me ever being informed of its presence.

Finally I also noticed that there are 2 non-identical instances of Pulse Audio being initiated... the first is the regular plain Pulse Audio and the second is Pulse Audio with KDE Routing, which is mysterious since KDE is not installed and I also don't understand why audio needs any sort of "routing" at all. The word ROUTING, in the context I understand it, should be reserved for networking and public mass transport providers.

As for why I was looking in there at all: Every previous edition of Mint has come with a firewall (usually GUFW, I think) and this LMDE version does not seem to have one or at least it's not obvious where it is named or kept. I'm totally uncertain whether I need to install GUFW or not, because I don't know if there is some sort of automatic firewall running somewhere with a secret name like "no name".

Oh yeah.... last part of the question: Is it OK to stop those 2nd instances of applications from being started up, or should I leave everything as it is?

[Pjotr]

this LMDE version

Wrong subforum....

Why did you select LMDE, by the way, as you're apparently new to Linux (or you wouldn't be posting in "Newbie Questions")? LMDE isn't very suitable for Linux beginners; for those, the main Mint edition 17.1 is much more suitable.

On topic: I don't know about LMDE, but I have no such problems in 17.1 Xfce (from which I'm currently posting this). About the firewall: you don't need GUFW, because UFW suffices:

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sudo ufw enable

Status check:

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sudo ufw status verbose

[nevart1]

Hey mate, thanks for your reply, and sorry that I could not answer before. I think that I am not "new enough" that LMDE poses many serious problems for me, but I do think that the behavior it is showing is odd and "Windows-like" due to running multiple instances of some programs without any real explanation of why it needs to. So that is the main point of the question, to solve why it is doing that.

I chose LMDE after getting sick of having to upgrade all the time with the main edition, and I think there were probably some other issues as well, but I can't remember.

Thanks for your input, and I really appreciate the helpful suggestions that you offered.

[karlchen]

Hello, nevart1.

Not precisely on topic, but still about LMDE. - Which LMDE release have you installed only lately? LMDE 1 or LMDE 2?
In case the answer should be LMDE 1, then you might be interested in 2 blog post by Clem
+ LMDE 1 will reach EOL on January 1st 2016
+ Upgrading LMDE (from UP8 to “Betsy”) (Upgrade LMDE 1 to LMDE 2)

The commandline

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inxi -Sx

should tell which LMDE version precisely you are using.

About the suspected or real duplicates in the list of Startup Applications:
On the Ubuntu based Linux Mint editions, I would check whether there are identical startup launcher files in the folders
+ /etc/xdg/autostart (systemwide startup applications)
+ ~/.config/autostart (personal startup applications)

I would not be amazed if LMDE 1 + 2 used the same mechanism.

Cheers,
Karl