launcher’s on desktop

There are two ways of making a launcher the hard way and the easy way.

The Easy Way first. (MATE desktop)

Right click Menu then Edit Menu.

Select sub menu you want the new launcher in and click New Item.

 

You can change the icon here too.

“Type: text box” is the Application(GUI) or Application in Terminal (command line)

The command : “text box” is where you put the terminal command to launch the program.

e.g. command : mate-terminal –hide-menubar –title=LFTP –command “lftp rtorrent”

Read about the options of Mate-Terminal Here.

The Name: & Comment: boxes can be whatever you want.

Click OK.  Right click menu and reload plugins and your app is now in the menu system.

Find the new launcher in the menu and right click and add to panel/desktop or favorites. Now…

The Hard Way.

You can do it manually. Make a new text-file named something.desktop and write this in there:

1.create *.desktop file in /usr/share/applications/

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/give-any-name.desktop

2.Paste below text

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application Terminal=false  Icon=/path/to/icon/icon.png  Name=give-name-here
Comment=Launcher Comment
Exec=/path/to/file/executable  Categories=Utility; 

Give Name= as you want.
As for Icon= and Exec=, use either a full path or a “system” name. For example, the VLC video player icon is either /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/vlc.png or simply vlc (without the .png extension!)

Dont forget to make the file executable (chmod +x something.desktop).

For Categories, consult the XDG Standards list