I'm trying to make an alarm clock using totem in crontab in Ubuntu 14.04. Reason for totem is because it seemed the easiest. I did test out the command totem --replace /home/edward/mornings.pls and all seemed to work as expected. I proceeded with to add this to the cron (note that it says 0 6 but I have set it to a time few minutes from "now"):
sudo crontab -e
0 6 * * * totem --replace /home/edward/mornings.pls
However, totem did not restart the playlist (yes, it was still open). I looked around a bit to try and troubleshoot things. /var/log/syslog shows that CRON seemed to execute it without problems:
Nov 20 06:00:01 compname CRON[24634]: (root) CMD (totem --replace /home/edward/mornings.pls)
I tried appending > /home/edward/mornjobs.txt to the end of the command to get some output (both > and &>). The file was empty. Looking some more, it was suggested that I should set the DISPLAY:
0 6 * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 && totem --replace /home/edward/mornings.pls &> /home/edward/mornjobs.txt
Tried without the &&, as DISPLAY=:0 and DISPLAY=:0.0, exported the DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY and still totem does not restart the playlist without (visible) error. Even shutting down totem doesn't open it anew. So what am I missing here?
