First, I liked your idea about using a crontab file in your /home/user (~/) directory. I kept running into a problem that (in Ubuntu) ‘crontab -e’ kept editing (more on this in my second point) a crontab file in the /tmp directory. I had to read around, and eventually I found the little tidbit (in the crontab manpage) about ‘crontab [-u user] file’, which allows you to set where a user’s official crontab is created/used. Ubuntu still copies the crontab to /tmp, but that is a rights thing… unix/linux doesn’t like for you to do direct editing of the active crontab file, so crontab, the program, (in Ubuntu) is written to copy the crontab file to /tmp, edit it there, and then copy your changes into place after it frees up the target crontab file. Tricky, but not something that a normal user should be concerned about… except to ignore the file name one in the editor of choice.

Second, You mentioned “the default text editor” and suggested that it was set to vim. Not so. I’ve never changed it in Gutsy, and it was set to nano. For ease of use, I added –
# set the default editor to gedit
export EDITOR=gedit
into my ~/.bashrc file. I re-ran my ~/.bashrc (was it ‘. .bashrc’ or ‘./.bashrc’ to re-run?)

Third, I saw another site’s comments about using a GUI alternative for setting/creating the cron (which was incomplete).
In Ubuntu,
3a) there is the command-line crontab that everyone should know and love.
3b) There is a gcrontab tool, which I found to be very easy for the non-programmer to use. For the casual administrator, it should be the perfect solution, and is completely compliant with the standard crontab file. Being a programmer, I didn’t really like having so many clicks to enter a crontab line, but I like that it is organized
3c) Another site’s comments raved about KCron. WI like KCron’s design/function much better than gcrontab, and KCron performs a “dual” function under KDE. It is the scheduler, and it can set environment variables, appropriate in the KDE scheme. KCron didn’t ask what Crontab file to load or show anything in my current (by then) ~/crontab file. I assume that KCron is not crontab compliant, since it didn’t automagically import my current ~/crontab file. So, unless you want to use KCron exclusivelyon a KDE instead of the Unix/Linux standard crontab file, I’d stay away from KCron.

Mine are purely editorial/informative comments. Your tutorial is very good, minus the explanation of how to set the user’s crontab file to ~/crontab (a most important tidbit), and the suggestion that vim is the default editor.

Peace,

Barney

30 7 * * 1-4 {command}
45 8 * * 5 {command}

To turn off your alarms for holidays or when you leave on vacation, you can simply “comment out” your alarm. Comment lines in your crontab is any line that starts with ‘#’. So, simply change each line you want to disable to something like:

# 30 7 * * 1-5 {command}

Enabling it again later is only a matter of removing that hash mark.

Also, I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it looks like there is a package called “gnome-schedule” which is a GUI front-end to cron–cool!

Also, is there a way to stop the alarms from occurring? Holidays, sick days, vacation, etc. I don’t want to be waking up if I don’t have to!