Useful references:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/80627/how-can-i-change-the-icon-of-an-application-in-the-unity-launcher
http://superuser.com/questions/460247/how-do-i-change-an-application-icon-on-ubuntu

Hi Jc,

I did a bit investigation and found out that in order to show the icon in the taskbar, an icon file has to be in ~/.local/share/hicolor/64x64 folder or mulitple icon files have to be in its respective folder for different resolutions. a Slicer.desktop file has to be in ~/.local/share/applications/ folder.

to accomplish this, there are several options:

1. create a simple setup script to copy these files from Slicer's resource directory.

2. change Slicer Launcher so that it will check if there are these files in place, otherwise would copy these files.

3. make current Slicer.tar.gz something like a windows exe so when installed/executed it not only extract the content of the tar.gz but also set up the icon and desktop files.

both option 2 and 3 would be seamless to users and require less operation. option 1 is easy to implement but has to be manually done and can be easily missed by users.

what do you think? do you have any other suggestion?

Thanks,
-Kevin

I would vote for simplifying the user experience.

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for reporting back.

I guess the first step could be to add a script named "setup-linux-unity-desktop-icon.sh" to:

Slicer/Utilities/Scripts/

That script would be packager along side the "Slicer" launcher and named:

setup-unity-desktop-icons.sh

That way, user would be able to run that script and have the icon showing up in unity and in the task bar.

For nightly build, the shortcut would be named "Slicer-rXXXX-YYYY-MM-DD.desktop"

Thanks for your help,
Jc