Linux standalone distibution

[Robert Lawrence]

Jacqueline:

Under Linux, to preserve the permissions, you will need to use a "compressed tar ball" (*.tgz or *.tar.gz) file is the normal way.

Say you have a directory of /home/jacqueline/mynewapp and you want to distribute the contents on the mynewapp folder, you could issue the following commands:

cd /home/jacqueline/
tar cvzf mynewapp.tar.gz mynewapp

Basically, change to the directory just above the directory you want to archive.  Then the tar command is passed with "cvzf" (c=create, v=verbose, z=compress, f=destination file), the archive filename, then the directory to be included.

tar xvzf mynewapp.tar.gz  will untar/ungzip the archive file back into a directory.

As to icons, Linux (and most Unix-like systems) do not have support icons on/in a file.  Depending on the variant of Linux and the desktop GUI used (KDE, GNOME, GNUstep, etc) they all have slightly different ways of telling the GUI file manager how to associate an icon with an application or document type.  a *.desktop file is the most common for the mainstream GUIs (i.e GNOME).

A desktop file looks like this

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
GenericName=New LiveCode App
Name=NewApp
Exec=/usr/local/bin/mynewapp
Icon=mynewapp.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Qt;Gnome;Applications;

Where the above is defined as follows:
 
Generic name = Brief Description of application.
Icon = The image to display for the icon
Terminal = Is this a terminal application, should I start it as one?
Type = Type of program this is, can be used in placing the icon in a menu.
Categories = This information is what is mainly used to place the icon in a given menu if an XML file to specify such is not present. The setup for menus is handled a little differently by every Linux distro.

Regards,
Robert

----- Original Message -----
From: "J. Landman Gay" <jacque at hyperactivesw.com>
To: "LiveCode Mailing List" <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 9:25:28 PM
Subject: Linux standalone distibution

A couple of questions about distributing for Linux.

When I zip a standalone it loses its executable bit, and the user has to 
manually set it after it's unzipped. Is there a way to compress a file 
so that it remains executable?

Is there a way to stick an icon on the standalone so that it attaches 
when unzipped?

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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