gleedadswell
July 18th, 2013, 03:33 AM
Hi everyone,
I'm running Maple (a symbolic algebra program for those who don't know it) under Ubuntu 12.04. One of my frequent complaints about Maple is that, while they provide a linux version, it is very poorly integrated with linux. So, they don't provide it as .deb and .rpm files. They have their own custom built installer which doesn't do nearly such a good job of setting everything up. Fundamentally Maple is just a rather big and complicated java application.
Anyway, I was able to make maple come up in dash fairly easily (using alacarte). The installer also created a .desktop file which I was able to drag to my launcher. But it took me a while to get maple to show up in the "open with" list in nautilus so that I can set it as the default application for all of my maple files. So I thought I'd post the solution in case it is useful to other people. This issue may come up with other applications (particularly java applications which people often install without going through the package managers).
Go to the .desktop file and added %f to the "Exec=..." line as suggested here:
http://ubuntugenius.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/ubuntu-fix-add-program-to-list-of-applications-in-open-with-when-right-clicking-files-in-nautilus/
If that doesn't work try %U instead of %f (can someone who knows about .desktop files explain what these codes mean?). At the point I had done this it still wasn't working.
The problem was that the maple installer had created this .desktop file in the directory where I had told it to install maple. In my case it was in
/usr/share/maple17/bin
because I had told it to install maple to /usr/share/maple17. But for nautilus to see the .desktop file it needs to be in
/usr/share/applications
So I copied it to that location and now everything seems to work.
Cheers!
I'm running Maple (a symbolic algebra program for those who don't know it) under Ubuntu 12.04. One of my frequent complaints about Maple is that, while they provide a linux version, it is very poorly integrated with linux. So, they don't provide it as .deb and .rpm files. They have their own custom built installer which doesn't do nearly such a good job of setting everything up. Fundamentally Maple is just a rather big and complicated java application.
Anyway, I was able to make maple come up in dash fairly easily (using alacarte). The installer also created a .desktop file which I was able to drag to my launcher. But it took me a while to get maple to show up in the "open with" list in nautilus so that I can set it as the default application for all of my maple files. So I thought I'd post the solution in case it is useful to other people. This issue may come up with other applications (particularly java applications which people often install without going through the package managers).
Go to the .desktop file and added %f to the "Exec=..." line as suggested here:
http://ubuntugenius.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/ubuntu-fix-add-program-to-list-of-applications-in-open-with-when-right-clicking-files-in-nautilus/
If that doesn't work try %U instead of %f (can someone who knows about .desktop files explain what these codes mean?). At the point I had done this it still wasn't working.
The problem was that the maple installer had created this .desktop file in the directory where I had told it to install maple. In my case it was in
/usr/share/maple17/bin
because I had told it to install maple to /usr/share/maple17. But for nautilus to see the .desktop file it needs to be in
/usr/share/applications
So I copied it to that location and now everything seems to work.
Cheers!