I’ve been using UBuntu 11.10 for a week or so now but hadn’t really had an opportunity to poke around much yet. That began to change yesterday when oddly enough I wanted to add a couple shortcuts to my desktop. One would think adding a shortcut to the desktop in Unity would be as simple as right clicking and selecting the correct menu option. But you would be wrong. In Unity I’m finding there are few things that are as easy as they should be. I came to find out that adding shortcuts to my desktop required a bit more work than I anticipated. After a considerable amount of Googling I found there were two methods. One of which I found didn’t work and one that I found did. I’ll describe the method that didn’t work first.
Did not work:
The first method involves opening Dash, searching for the application/utility you want on your desktop, selecting it, and dragging it off Dash onto your Desktop. According to the information I found this method must have worked at some point but doesn’t for me under UBuntu 11.10. I was able to drag icons off Dash onto my Desktop but instead of an executable icon I instead got:
Trying to launch the shortcut by clicking on the icon results in:
UNTRUSTED APPLICATION LAUNCHER
The application launcher “filezilla.desktop” has not been marked as trusted. If you do > not know the source of this file, launching it may be unsafe.
‘ls -la’ shows
lrwxrwxrwx 1 name name 41 2011-10-31 20:47 filezilla.desktop -> /usr/share/applications/filezilla.desktop
Trying to launch the app from the command line via that link results in “Command Not Found”. Quite the pickle.
Did Work:
However there is a method that works, but it requires installation of ‘gnome-panel’ first. UBuntu 11.10 does not install the Gnome desktop environment in its default installation. But if you ‘sudo apt-get install gnome-panel’ from the command line and then run the following command (ALT+f2 first) “gnome-desktop-item-edit ~/Desktop/ –create-new”, you’ll be able to add a usable icon to your desktop.
Bit more work than I anticipated at first, but at least it works. It’s been a few years since I’ve used Linux so I still need to knock some of the rust off. But I despair for the new Linux user who runs into this issue.
