Unity launcher made with Alacarte iconless

Question

trying to create a launcher with a .png image file and main menu keeps on removing it. is .png not supported or do I need to edit the image first?

Answer 1

What goes wrong

I tried to create a launcher with Alacarte, with the same result. It turns out that when Alacarte creates a new launcher, it does not handle the icon's file extension correctly on custom icons. In the Icon= line of the launcher; it simply leaves out the extension.

How you can fix it

In your home directory, there is a folder ~/.local/share/applications (.local is invisible by default, press Ctrl + H to make it visible). That is the location where your launcher (file) is created.

• Open the folder
• Look for a file named alacarte-made.desktop (if you created more than one, they will be numbered)
• Open gedit, drag the file alacarte-made.desktop on to the open gedit window to open it.
• Look for the line, starting with Icon=, replace the section after Icon= with the path to your icon, including the .png extension.

Note

You might have to log out and back in to see the result.