Help File Library: Four Steps to a Mozilla Shortcut

Sensei's Note:
This Help File assumes you are using KDE and have a need to make shortcuts on your desktop (ala Windoze). It covers basic icon linking with programs that need console commands to run them.

1) Write a bash shell script.

2) Make the script executable.

3) Add Mozilla icons to your /usr/share/icons file

4)Create a desktop shortcut

1) Write a bash shell script (not as hard as it sounds)

In a text editor (kwrite, kedit, vi, emacs), type the following:

#!/bin/bash

cd /path/to/package

exec ./mozilla

Save your new script as mozilla.script or whatever you'd like and place it in your /home/username-here directory (you don't need the .script prefix, but I like to use it for organizational purposes). Change /path/to/package to reflect the location of the package folder that was created during the Mozilla installation. Mine is in /home/brian/package.

2) Make the script executable

In a terminal, type the following: chmod +x mozilla.script

What you've done here is you've used the chmod +x filename command to make the script executable.

3) Add Mozilla icons to your /usr/share/icons file

You can find a Mozilla desktop icon in the package/ folder. The pathname is package/icons/mozicon50.xpm...there is also a mozicon16.xpm, but it's microscopic. In order to make the Mozilla icon available, you need to move it to /usr/share/icons (the default icon location in most RedHat-based distros). To do this, you need to have root privileges...so either use the "su" command or login as root. At a terminal, type the following:

cp /pathname/to/package/icons/mozicon50.xpm /usr/share/icons

4) Create a desktop shortcut

KDE:

Open KFM and cd to /home/user/Desktop. Right-click in the window and choose: new application. Name the shortcut appropriately and then you need to assign a path to the program; but in our case, we are going to use the path to the script instead of the path to the program. Since the script is saved in /home/username-here, the path to the script would be /home/username-here/name.script. By making the shortcut point towards the script, a click on the shortcut executes the script that in turn, executes the ./mozilla script.

Select the mozicon50 icon and you're done.

GNOME:

I haven't used GNOME yet, so I can't provide instructions on how to create icons in the GNOME/Enlightenment environment. If anyone can fill me in, I'll update the Help File and give credit where credit is due.