How to have applications start automatically in gnome

I’m running ubuntu jaunty on my office machine. For a while now I have wanted to start pidgin automatically at startup.

Snooping around a bit, I found the command gnome-session-properties which allows to do just that. However, there is an easier way:

Simply copy the .desktop file of your application to ~/.config/autostart. In my case that was simply ::

cp /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop ~/.config/autostart

This saves you the trouble of having to fill in all dialogue fields by hand - plus you have a nice icon.