The problem is quite simple: you need to run a script on a regular basis, so you put it in one of the directories of the /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly} hierarchy but for some reason cron just seems to ignore it.

First, check that the script is really where you think it is, that it is executable (or else chmod a+x yourscript to make it so) and that it’s name does contain only letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens. In fact, a script named run.me won’t be run because of the dot.

You can get the list of the scripts that are eligible to run with:

$ run-parts --test /etc/cron.daily

You can change the argument /etc/cron.daily to any other directory.

If you have problems (i.e. blank or green screen or the error “main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `XVID’” in vlc) viewing XviD videos in Debian Lenny and you are using debian-multimedia repository then here is how to solve temporarily the problem.

What we are going to do now is to downgrade the minimum set of libraries for restoring vlc/totem capability to play videos. In addition we will tell apt-get not to upgrade those libraries next time we run apt-get upgrade. The latter is just temporary, as hopefully the problem will be solved in a few days weeks (months?).

Here is the two simple commands: