How to add portacle.desktop to my launcher in Ubuntu

[sbayeta]

Hi! Sorry if this is not the appropriate place for this question. The official page says the following about running portacle in Ubuntu

Note that you cannot move or copy portacle.desktop elsewhere. It has to reside in the portacle directory for it to work.

I tried adding a link to the portacle.desktop in my ~/.local/share/applications, and the launcher now shows the icon but nothing happens when I click on it. I realize this is probable a dumb linux noob question, sorry if this is the case. I tried googling about this but found no solution.

Thanks for any help on this. Santiago

[csrabak]

Almost a year since this question has been posted, and probably the OP already or solved the issue or made amends with the state of affairs.

The design of the portacle environment and the specific portacle.desktop launcher file became at odds with more recent design and security decisions of the Gnome desktop used in Ubuntu, which stopped support of executable .desktop files "from everywhere".

The solution is an hybrid of the common recipes for this kind of situation, as the portacle file has a machinery to run only from its directory and there it cannot be executable:

1. Copy the portacle.desktopto ~/.local/share/applications, NB copy the file do not make a symbolic link;
2. Edit the sixt line of the file to have the following content: Exec=bash -c 'cd $(dirname ~/common-lisp/portacle/portacke.desktop) && ./portacle.run' (it is all in single line);
3. Be sure that the file maintained its executable status.

If all above is set accordingly, you can now start portacle via Activities/Applications launcher in your desktop.

This "recipe" works in Ubuntu 22.04.4, GNOME 42.9, Mutter windows manager, with portacle 1.4c release.

HTH