Well
Looks like I am giving up on Linux, I was told it was the easiest most configurable operating system and user friendly OS. That is obviously wrong.
Your method appeared to work but I have no interaction with it.
This would be fine if I was just running a short breakfest script and then shutting down but I am using this to run a complex clan bot. I can not even shut it down. If the script hiccups then I cannot recover. I just wanted mafia to autostart on its own like it does on my windows xp system. It autostarts after rollover and my clan bot script runs until 5 min before rollover and it issues a quit command to mafia and then XP starts it back up after rollover. The script could encounter problems during the day (Blame Jick problems) that need servicing and I like to also go on and manualy do some things while the script is running like browse the message boards. I also need the abilty to turn it off at any time without having to issue the command through chat from another character.
Thanks for your help Spiny, I guess I wasted enough time on this project if it is limited to "headless mode"
Sorry you're having difficulties getting what you want accomplished and I'm really upset that you're blaming Linux, as a whole, for the problems you're having. Cron is archaic and complex. Linux is fairly easy, especially Ubuntu. I tried to help you, by getting my RL friends to help me help you. You said you wanted to run a bot, that to me means set it and forget it, and a good bot program should be able to handle issues it may encounter. You said you wanted it to boot up at rollover, cron with good timing approximation would allow that to happen. Now you say you want to be hands on and do what all you might do, in addition to bot functions, like read message boards etc as though you were manually logged in. I suppose you could script that in, but it sounds like you just want mafia to autorun WITH its interface to do what you want to do. I suppose you could still do this if there's a CLI command to load in browser, then you'd start the script with:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java -jar /home/mredge73/KoLmafia.jar --CLI
and NOT feed it any scripts to login with. You'd enter your username and pw and be faced with a CLI prompt. If there IS a load in web browser CLI command, I'm not sure what that might be atm as I'm not logged in to look.
My clan has started experimenting with running a bot using PyKol, but even that is running on it's own with no user interaction other than writing the script and watching it do it's thing in shell.
Anyhow, if anyone else can help you, great. Good luck.
-Spiny