I have Firefox 56.0 deployed on Pureos 8.0 /home directory

and it works fine, but accessing /home/firefox.bin to launch the browser is awkward.

How can i add a shortcut (graphic icon) under “Activities” to launch Firefox ?

1 Like

You need to make a .desktop file inside /usr/local/share/applications/

nano /usr/local/share/applications/firefox.desktop

And put something like that inside

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Firefox
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
GenericName=Web Browser
X-GNOME-FullName=Firefox Web Browser
Exec=/home/firefox.bin %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=firefox
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
StartupWMClass=Firefox
StartupNotify=true
1 Like

Pardon my ignorance …

What does [Desktop Entry] represent ?

Other than that, can i assume that exactly copy-pasting
your lines as-is will do the job ?

Arch Linux Wiki got a lot of information about GNU/Linux systems, check the desktop entries page to understand how works.

I just copied my system Firefox desktop entry

Basically with that files you say to the desktop where is the app executable (Exec=…) what icon use (Icon=…) and a few options like name, if you want to show a notification when you open the app, etc.

The system apps are in /usr/share/applications/ you can learn how works a little better reading the desktop entries inside, but you need to be admin to add anything here and it’s no necessary, the route I specified to you is your user one to store the apps.

1 Like

Thank you for being so helpful