On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 02:48:36PM -0700, Redefined Horizons wrote: > I'd like to make a task launcher that opens an application I have > installed on my Debian system with Synaptic. I don't think you mean Synaptic. Or maybe I just got my binding wrong. You're saying that 1) You installed an app on your system using Synaptic, and now 2) You'd like to make a task launcher for it. If I got that right, what do you mean by 'task launcher'? I know Windows quite well, but I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you'd like to be able to double-click on something and make it run a given application? If you're using GNOME (and if you are, you'll probably see a little foot icon at the top left of your screen), right-click on your desktop to create an icon there which will launch whatever application you're interested in. > Where do I find the file to link to? Am I looking for an ".exe" > extension, or something else? Nearly every Linux program is in one of four places: /usr/bin/ /bin/ /sbin /usr/sbin Of those, the first contains by far the largest number of programs. On my machine the number of files in /usr/bin is four times the total from the other three. /usr/bin is where you'll look for most of what you want. However, you shouldn't have to look there very often. Your GNOME menus probably already contain a menu item for every program you care about. But let's say you wanted to create a shortcut on your desktop so that you could double-click and run Firefox. You could look in /usr/bin (from within Nautilus, say) and see that there's a file called 'firefox' there. On my machine, 'firefox' is listed as a 'link to shell script' in Nautilus. If you double-click on it, it runs the web browser. So now you know that your browser is /usr/bin/firefox. So now right-click on the GNOME desktop. Click 'Create Launcher'. Fill in the form in there: 'Name' is 'Firefox'. 'Generic Name' is, I would suppose, 'web browser' (though I never fill in that field). 'Command' is '/usr/bin/firefox', though I believe just 'firefox' alone would do it. This may be too much explanation. I may not even be explaining what you're after. So I'll leave it there and see if you have any questions. > On Windows I look for the .exe, which is often in C:\Programs. I'm > trying to figure out the Debian equivalent. You mean C:\Program Files, don't you? I just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. /usr/bin is basically the equivalent of C:\Program Files. -- Stephen R. Laniel steve@laniels.org +(617) 308-5571 http://laniels.org/ PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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