Ubuntu – How to customize an icon on the dash/launcher

unity-dash

all. I have a question that has been bugging me recently.. Say I install Blender.. I am using the Bumblebee project thing, so in order to properly use it, I have to go to the terminal and type "optirun blender". If I just click on the icon on the dash, it will run without the proper parameter being passed. Is there a way I could customize the Blender launcher on the dash so it would always launch it with the optirun parameter?

Thanks.

Best Answer

You can copy the blender.desktop out of /usr/share/applications, and into your ~/.local/share/applications directory, and edit it there to have a different command line. Don't edit the one in /usr/share/applications, as package updates will revert your changes.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to remove the “Dash Home” icon from the Unity launcher

I wasn't satisfied with the answers so I compared the 11.10 Unity-2D source with earlier versions. It can be done. Here's how to do it:

(for 11.04/11.10)

gksudo gedit /usr/share/unity-2d/launcher/Launcher.qml

(for 12.04)

gksudo gedit /usr/share/unity-2d/shell/launcher/Launcher.qml

Scroll down until you find the following section:

    Component.onCompleted: {
        items.appendModel(bfbModel);
        items.appendModel(applications);
        items.appendModel(workspaces);
        items.appendModel(devices);
        shelfItems.appendModel(trashes);
    }

items.appendModel(bfbModel); is the offending line of code. Remove this line (or comment it out). Save your changes and close the file.

Restart Unity-2D with:

killall unity-2d-launcher

(12.04)

killall unity-2d-shell

Let's hope someone adds a way to toggle this feature in the upcoming Unity settings manager. Cheers!

Ubuntu – My custom .desktop file appears in Dash as a text file

If you take a good look in Dash, you will find out that matlab.desktop does not appear as an application, but the file matlab.desktop appears in search, or recently used, since you obviously edited it.

The error

The reason is that Dash does not see it as a valid .desktop file for (at least) the following reason:

You should not use relative paths in a .desktop file (Desktop/Programs/scripts/runMatlab.sh is relative), but absolute paths.

Other possible reasons could be an invalid icon path or the fact that you call the script without the preceding sh (if the script is not executable, but given the other information in your question, that seems not to be the case).

Notes

Another thing is that if you store the script on what appears to be a local directory, you should not store the .desktop file in /usr/share/applications, but in ~/.local/share/applications.
There is no need to make a .desktop file executable if you run it from Dash or the Launcher. Most launchers in either /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications are not. Only if you locate it on- and run it from your Desktop.