It's hard to explain this without a picture, so I'll add one. Basically, I installed IntelliJ IDEA using this PPA on 16.04. After installting, I found that typing "idea" in the standard program seach was turning up nothing, though the command intellij-idea-community
was launching the program correctly.
So I created a .desktop
file at /usr/share/applications/intellij_idea.desktop
with the following contents:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=IntelliJ IDEA
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/intellij-idea-community/bin/idea.sh
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/intellij-idea-community/bin/idea.png
Comment=Integrated Development Environment
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;IDE;
Name[en]=IntelliJ IDEA
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.22
And now, IDEA start showing up in search. So far so good.
I have an annoyance, though. Once IDEA starts up, the icon gets replaced by the ugly default question-mark thing (see the last icon in Unity):
Everything works fine. It's just that this icon is an eyesore. Also, if I lock this icon to launcher and then close IDEA and click on the icon to start the IDE, it doesn't. Instead, I just see a "busy" animation of this icon. To launch, I again have to type "idea" in the search and click on the png icon.
Any explanations for this?
Best Answer
What happened
intellij-idea-community
installs a perfectly working.desktop
file:/usr/share/applications/intellij-idea-community.desktop
. Sometimes however, a freshly installed application needs a log out/in to show up in Dash.This is apparently the case in your situation. I tried installing it with the same result. Simply log out/in did the job:
Your home-made launcher does start up the application, but does not connect to the window, so a generic icon shows up to represent the window.
How to fix
Remove your own made launcher from
/usr/share/applications/intellij_idea.desktop
, log out and back in.important note
In any way, since you tried lock the (incorrect?) icon to the launcher, make sure to remove any Intellij IDEA - related
.desktop
file from~/.local/share/applications
, since possibly remaining.desktop
files will overrule the global one.