Adding To The Panels In Gnome.

Posted: 2 Feb 2005

In other operating systems, adding things to the desktop panels is usually a simple matter of dragging them from the menus and dropping them on the panels. Does Linux have this ability?

Yes.

and it works rather well.

If the icon appears in the drop-down main-menus, then it can easily be dragged to the panels and attached.



After you let go of the mouse button, you'll see the new icon appear in the place you dragged it, as in the image below.



But what if the item doesn't exist in the menus? What if it's some obscure program that the menus don't like, like KSnapShot? Are we out of luck?

Nope.

We're still good. Even though it's not as easy as dragging and dropping, it's not much harder.

Simply right-click anywhere on a blank portion of the main-panel and follow the items Add to Panel -> Launcher



When you click on Launcher, a new window will open that looks like the image below:



Now you need to locate the file the system uses to run the program. With a program called "which" this is made easy.

Open a terminal and type in the following: (replace "ksnapshot" with the program you're trying to locate)

linux:/ # which ksnapshot
/opt/kde3/bin/ksnapshot
linux:/ #


As you can see, the output of mine is "/opt/kde3/bin/ksnapshot", so in the appropriate space, that's what I would enter to the launcher.



After that, it's always nice to have the correct icon displayed, so click on the "No Icon" icon



and it'll bring up a browser window to help you look for the icon. Most likely, you'll find the appropriate icon in that window. If not, press the Browse button to search even further.

Most of the icons are found in the opt/gnome/share/icons or opt/kde3/share/icons directories. After about a minute of searching, I found mine. It was named "ksnapshot.png", as is displayed below.



After that, click "Open" to select the icon, then "Ok" on the Browse Icons window, and you'll be presented with your new icon in the appropriate box.



After that, just click "Ok" and the new icon will appear on your panel.



If you've done everything correctly, when you click on the icon, the program will begin.



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