I wrote a script which greps through the output of synclient to determine whether a laptop's touchpad has miraculously turned itself off (Ubuntu seems to /love/ doing this recently) and, if so, turns it back on. The script is something like this: #!/bin/bash while true ; do if [ `synclient | grep -e"TouchpadOff[\s]*1" | wc -l` -ge 1 ] ; then synclient TouchpadOff=0 fi sleep(3) done (I don't have the laptop to hand right now but you get the point! I will update later when I'm at my laptop if that's incorrect) So I tried running this as an upstart script so my touchpad can heal itself without any interaction. But it seems synclient doesn't find the current user's X session when my script is upstart'ed. I tried running it by using something like su -c myscript.sh ledneb in my script stanza, but to no avail. Should I be looking in the direction of /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc rather than upstart? Is there a proper way to have this script run in the context of the current (or even a hard-coded) user's x session?