On Saturday 05 December 2009 16:43:04 Mark Goldstein wrote:
It was easy in KDE3 - right click on panel, select "Add Application to Panel" -> "Add Non-KDE Application". Then you could adjust it, e.g. select some appropriate icon instead of default one. This action added "ExecButton" section to kickerrc.
I could not find such possibility in KDE4 (4.3.3). I can "drag" the application icon to the panel. But if I'm trying to change the icon, it is changed for the whole "type" of executables. I've searched on the net and found that someone advised to use "Quick launcher" widget for it. But then you have to create ".desktop" file for the application. I found though that if you create ".desktop" file for application, it can be dragged to the panel and this solves the problem.
Is there simpler way of doing it than creating .desktop file for each application I want to have on the panel?
First add the non-menu item to the menu using kmenuedit (or right click on the K menu icon->Menu Editor) then drag the resulting icon from the menu as usual. If you don't want the icon in the menu, you can then remove it again with kmenuedit - it will stay in the panel. This is because adding an item to the menu creates a .desktop file for it in .local/share/applications, and adding it to the user's menu that is merged with the system menu structure to make the menu you see, whereas removing it just removes the entry from the user menu, not the .desktop file.
(I'm not asking why was that simple option removed. I guess, there were many sobbing users requesting to remove this annoying feature :-( ).
See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163831 . The intention was to replace having a menu item for everything (the 'KDE 3 has too many options' meme) with drag and drop where possible, and the implementation of this for non-.desktop-file-owning binaries has always been minimal. The drag from /usr/bin in a file manager to panel you tried first should create a .local/share/applications .desktop file that has fully editable attributes instead of just creating a link to the binary as you discovered. I've proposed this in the bug but tell if you can think of a better approach. Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org