[maemo-developers] Integration with hildon desktop

[From: Mathias Teikari]

On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 09:00 -0600, Jeffrey Barish wrote:
> It still seems likely that I have something wrong in my .desktop file.  Here
> is what it contains.  Perhaps someone will notice something.
> 
> [Desktop Entry]
> Encoding=UTF-8
> Name=My_application
> GenericName=My_application
> Exec=/usr/bin/my_application.sh
> Type=Application
> X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
> Icon=my_application
> X-Window-Icon=my_application
> X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
> X-Osso-Service=my_application
> X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Hi Jeff,

I ran into the same problem a couple of months ago with the Hildon
Gnumeric port. The icon wouldn't show up in the task navigator and if
the app was ran in scratchbox (or from the device command line) the
following rather non-informative warning message was given:

hildon-desktop[4156]: GLIB WARNING ** default - Application Gnumeric
Spreadsheet - Gnumeric did not provide valid .desktop file

This was driving me nuts as the desktop file was correctly listing all
properties documented or even mentioned (as far as I could find at
least) in any Maemo documentation!

After a lot of digging around in the hildon-desktop code[1], I found
that the reason why the task navigator could not find the icon was
because the application window WM class property did not match the
desktop exec property and therefore the WM class used must be defined
explicitly in the .desktop file.

[1]
https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/tags/hildon-desktop/2.0.18-1/

In technical terms, the solution is to set StartupWMClass parameter in
the .desktop file such that the application will map at least one window
with the given string as its WM class. 

In practical terms, I would guess from your .desktop listing above that
you need to add either:

StartupWMClass=My_application 

or

StartupWMClass=my_application

[ or something similar, depending on how your app creates it's
window(s) ;-) ]

Regards,
-- 

Mathias Teikari
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