Adding a custom launcher in Ubuntu

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 06:35:00 +0000

It is not straightforward to have your favorite programs that are not installed via package manager appear on Ubuntu (14.04) launcher. Couple of ways to do that:

Sometimes, when the program is up, you can just right click and say “add to launcher”. It would work for most programs. However, this will fail for editors such as PyCharm that maintain project state and the launcher added this way will point to the specific project.
The right way to do is this:
- Create a .desktop entry For instance, for pycharm, do :

$ sudo nano /usr/share/applications/pycharm.desktop


[Desktop Entry]
Name=PyCharm
Type=Application
Exec=/home/hvishwanath/Downloads/pycharm-community-4.0.5/bin/pycharm.sh
Terminal=false
Icon=/home/hvishwanath/Downloads/pycharm-community-4.0.5/bin/pycharm.png
Comment=PyCharm community edition 4.0.5
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;IDE
Name[en]=pycharm.desktop

* You can then search for the entry in main “Search” in the launcher, and simply drag and drop the pycharm.desktop entry that you would find on to the launcher.

That is it.

Setting up Tun/Tap networking for a Qemu Image

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 07:08:00 +0000

Qemu is a very useful utility to play around with your code/application environment before you are ready to package it as a virtual appliance. Though there are various wikis available to help you setup networking between qemu guest and your host machine, I found that the steps required to setup TUN/TAP networking so that the guest is accessible from your extended network was either not accurate, or was not put in simple terms. So, here goes. Assuming that you are using Debian/Ubuntu as your host OS and you have qemu and necessary qemu-managers installed.

Linux on Harish Vishwanath

Adding a custom launcher in Ubuntu

Setting up Tun/Tap networking for a Qemu Image