Dtyjlui

I created a my-app.desktop file for a program I wrote. When I double-click it, I get the error message "There was an error launching the application". How can I get more detailed information about what the problem is?

I saw a reference to a "details" section of the dialog box, but there is nothing like that present in the one I see. If I were on my Mac, I'd open the Console app to see if any errors were logged, but I haven't learned of anything similar on Ubuntu.

(Note that unlike other similarly-titled questions, I am not asking what's wrong with this particular .desktop file; I want to know how to find out in general.)

Here's a trick you can use. Create a wrapper script for your application that will launch it and capture the error output:

#!/usr/bin/env bash



## Launch 'yourapp' and capture its standard error output

/path/to/yourapp 2>~/myapp.log

Save that as ~/foo.sh and make it executable with chmod +x ~/foo.sh. Now, point your desktop launcher to it instead. Something like:

[Desktop Entry]

Version=2.0

Type=Application

Exec=/home/kevin/foo.sh

Terminal=true

Comment=My app!

That will redirect any error messages to ~/myapp.log and you can examine them at your leisure. You can use 2>>~/myapp.log if you want successive error messages to be appended to the file instead of overwriting it.

As an aside, the reason that the $PATH is different is because you are probably setting your $PATH in ~/.bahsrc which is not read by the graphical environment. It is also a bad idea since the $PATH will be set every time you open a new terminal and that is needless overhead. Use ~/.profile for this instead. For more details on which files are read when see here and for more on which file should be used for what, see here.

Found an answer to this question here: https://askubuntu.com/a/836842

Try this :

desktop-file-validate my-app.desktop

It outputs errors in your .desktop file. For example mine returned :

error: first group is not "Desktrop Entry"

So once I corrected the typo to Desktop Entry, the script ran successfully.

By running the following command in terminal:

awk -F= '/Exec=/{system($2)}' your_desktop_file.desktop

I am sure that you will find out if there is an error or not in your command assigned to the Exec field from inside of your .desktop file.

usually, the terminal(-output) gives you a lot of useful information, both on the application as well as the desktop file. An example:
if I run my application from the terminal, typing the command in the terminal, the application starts.

However, if there is something wrong, you can expect an output like:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/home/jacob/Bureaublad/werkmap_2.0/uploaded_versions/2.1.2/32_en_ppa    /qle-2.1.2/code/qle_quicklisteditor", line 4044, in <module>

    MainWindow()

  File "/home/jacob/Bureaublad/werkmap_2.0/uploaded_versions/2.1.2/32_en_ppa   /qle-2.1.2/code/qle_quicklisteditor", line 51, in __init__

    self.load_sectons()

AttributeError: 'MainWindow' object has no attribute 'load_sectons'

jacob@Jacobwerkkamer:~/Bureaublad/werkmap_2.0/uploaded_versions/2.1.2/32_en_ppa   /qle-2.1.2/code$ 

which gives you a lot of usefull information, even the line in your application that causes the error. (I messed it up on purpose)

The same with the desktop file, just open a terminal in the directory of the .desktop file and drag it on to the terminal. If you for example remove the Exec= line from a .desktop file, the terminal will tell you it cannot find the command to execute.

To test if the application gives an error, just run what you put after theExec= string.

The terminal output is usually very specific and useful in bug reports, like here.

This might help other people - this is the official spec of the desktop launcher files

The important section is : Recognized desktop entry keys - which shows you which values you need.

When I really can't figure it out, I:

cd ~/Desktop

ln -s /my/binary/thatIwanttorun mybinary

Then right click on the default icon that's created and point to a better graphic.