Sunday, April 1, 2012

Enabling 'Create Launcher' for Gnome 3 Desktop, Mint.

I can't right click and send shortcuts to the desktop. I can't drag shortcuts to the desktop. Just to use my browser I have to do 3 actions that used to take one. How is this usability enhancement? At least Mint has made it a lot more normal than other distros.

So anyway, now to show how to enable creating a desktop shortcut. (something that should have never been removed.

 1) Open your home folder.
2) Press the Ctrl+h key combination to show hidden files.
3) Navigate into the .gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory.
4) Create a new file called 'Create New Launcher'.
5) Edit the file and paste in the following (without quotes) "gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/Desktop" and save the file.
6) Right click on the file and select 'properties' from the menu. Click the permissions tab and check the 'Execute: Allow executing file as a program' option.

 Now if you right click on the desktop you'll be able to select 'scripts', 'create new launcher' from the menu and create a program launcher how you would expect to be able to crjouyeate one in previous versions of Gnome desktop.

 Enjoy

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks !
I use german language settings, so I need to replace "Desktop" by "Arbeitsfläche".
This will work in all languages :


#!/bin/bash
# Get desktop directory name
test -f ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs && source ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs
# Create Starter
gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ${XDG_DESKTOP_DIR:-$HOME/Desktop}

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for this easy and elegant solution.

Best solution I have found for OpenSUSE gnome 3.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Mike said...

Awesome, works perfect.

Thanks.

wikitec said...

Great post however there must be a generic way of doing this for all distros that use Gnome 3?

Michael Becker said...

Hello,

Thank you very much for posting this. It seems I learn something new about Linux every day! I recently upgraded my system to the latest version of Trisquel (which uses GNOME 3) and this change really tripped me up.

One thing I would suggest though, instead of using "~/Desktop" I would use "./" as the path. I tested it on my machine, and this allowed you to create the shortcut in whatever folder you were executing the script in. The previous method would only create the script on the desktop.

Cheers,
Michael

Eirik said...

Great guide indeeed, thanks!
As a new Linux user myself, this helped me enormously as I can now keep my friends who does not now anything about any OS especially Linux, away from everything but the desktop.

Happy Linux Guy said...

Thanks for all the additional suggestions, everyone. I've pretty much given up on Gnome 3. I still find it very unworkable. I've been using MATE and it works great just like Gnome 2 did.

Happy Linux Guy said...

http://mate-desktop.org/install/