how do I add a program to the panel?

[steve]

I am running PCLinuxOS 2009.2 with LXDE 0.4.1. I have been able to load applications into the panel without much trouble, however I have a printer program that isn't shown in menu when I try to load it into the panel. (TurboPrint) I also have KDE 3.5 loaded and it had no problem loading into it's panel. I looked at the directories in /usr/share/applications and both TurboPrint Control & TurboPrint Monitor are listed there. I would like to know how to get these to show up in the panel, or at least in the start menu so I can run them without having to go into a terminal and typing in start data. Can anyone help? Thank you

[Marty Jack]

Take a look at the .desktop files and see if they have an OnlyShowIn or NotShowIn line that is masking them. If that isn't it you can post one of the .desktop files and I'll take a look to see if I catch anything.

[steve]

Here is one of turboprint-monitor.desktop;

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=turboprint-monitor
Icon=tpmonitor.png
StartupNotify=false
DocPath=/usr/share/turboprint/doc/html/turboprint.html
Comment=Monitor TurboPrint printers
Terminal=0
Name=TurboPrint Monitor
Categories=System;Settings;

[Marty Jack]

I can reproduce the failure to appear. If I change the Terminal=0 to Terminal=false, on my system, it begins to appear.
The Desktop Entry Specification has this to say:

Code: Select all

The value types recognized are string, localestring, boolean, and numeric.
 * Values of type string may contain all ASCII characters except for control characters.
 * Values of type localestring are user displayable, and are encoded in UTF-8.
 * Values of type boolean must either be the string true or false. 

We use the glib package GKeyFile to parse desktop files, as I would suspect all of the GTK based menu processor (Gnome, Xfce, LXDE) do. KDE would have their own since it is Qt based. It would appear GKeyFile is enforcing this strictly. You could file a bug against glib if you wanted to. You should be in business if you edit the Terminal=0 to Terminal=false or just delete it because that is the default.

Ideally you would also file a bug against the producer of the failing packages because their desktop files violate the standard.

[steve]

Marty Jack, thank you for the reply. First I tried commenting out the line with # in front of it. That didn't work. Then I tried to edit the line to say Terminal=false, that didn't work either. I'll contact Turbo Print and let them know of the problem. Thanks.

[Marty Jack]

On further review I find that the original desktop entry you posted does appear in the menu on my system, so I no longer have an answer as to why it doesn't on your system, although technically the file is slightly out of spec. Apparently I was too tired to check this properly yesterday. It should be noted that you are running quite an old release of LXPanel.

[steve]

Marty Jack; After your last reply I decided to try something. Installing the new version of PCLinuxOS. That required reinstalling TurboPrint, Now I have TurboPrint available in LXDE but the monitor portion of it doesn't work. I can setup a printer and the printer will use the settings but the monitor will not show anything but the ink level and none of the buttons work in the monitor. Any suggestions? Thank you.