Linux application icon

[Richmond]

On 06/13/2010 11:12 PM, Damien Girard wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>
> On linux, applications does not bundle the icons like Windows or MacOS.
>
> You have to use xdg-utils tools to create desktop icons on the GNOME Desktop
> environment.
> http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/
>
>    
  Reading that made me feel both stupid and headachey!

Command-line apps do that to me.

The caveat is about 2 thirds of the way down the page:

"And now your product has a menu on any XDG compliant desktop!"

so; as you really don't know what sort of Window Manager and/or Desktop
manager your end-user favours this doesn't help much, except that, at least,
a subset of your end-users will end up with a predetermined icon. So, pop
a PNG image of the icon in your distribution archive for the "awkward"
ones . . .  :)

The next bit made my toes curl a bit:

"Changes in xdg-utils 1.0.1:

     * Several shell syntax issues causing failures on Ubuntu 6.10 "

despite the page supposedly having been updated this year, as Ubuntu
users are running at 10.04 I wonder how much further than 6.10 the
thing has been tested on.

This would also suggest that the thing has ONLY been tested on Ubuntu; which
while being the most popular desktop distro "out there", is not the only 
one by a very
long chalk indeed: who knows it may totally scr*w up on some other distro.

Being pessimistic; but better that than having egg all over my face when 
somebody
writes me a mildly abusive e-mail about my product showing up on their 
personal
Linux designed with 'Linux fron scratch' without a special icon.