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freedesktop

README.md

Installing desktop files for freedesktop

This directory contains files for desktop integration (icons, associations, menu entries) on https://freedesktop.org/ desktops, which practically means: desktops on Linux, FreeBSD and other free software Unix.

How to install

It is advised to build and install by executing this in the top-level castle-model-viewer directory:

make
sudo make install

The latter command makes a system-wide installation, copying the castle-model-viewer and castle-model-converter binaries to /usr/local/bin , to make them available on $PATH. It also installs some desktop files under /usr/local/share. You can undo it by

sudo make uninstall

If you would prefer to make an installation only for your used, and not use root privileges, you can also just run

cd freedesktop/
./install.sh

But in the latter case, it is your responsibility to make the binaries actually visible by X session. Note that you will need to modify $PATH used by the X session, which usually means you need to create and use the ~/.Xsession file. (Adjusting path of your shell, e.g. in ~/.bashrc, is not enough.)

Details how this works

This is for developers -- normal users can stop reading now :)

See http://library.gnome.org/devel/integration-guide/stable/desktop-files.html.en for basic GNOME integration instructions.

Desktop file

Icon file

  • Should be copied under /usr/share/icons/, most standard is /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/. Local user has this in ~/.local/share/icons/ and ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/

  • "48x48" is just indicated as most standard, and smaller versions will be generated from it. For SVG icons, I think (but didn't actually read this anywhere) they should go to "scalable" subdir.

  • Update: although on my Debian "scalable" subdir is indeed standard, it looks like desktop icon remains for some reason stupidly small (even though it's recorded in SVG file that resolution is 48x48). Yes, this happens to other programs with only scalable icons too, like eog. It doesn't happen e.g. to evolution --- because evolution just adds 48x48 icon as PNG file, in addition to SVG in scalable. Fortunately, we can trivially easy just autogenerate PNG 48x48 version to workaround this.

  • Do not specify icon extension in *.desktop file. Algorithm for searching icons (from spec http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec-latest.html) makes it clear that implementation will try appending various extensions on it's own. Besides, as noted above, we have both SVG and PNG versions of the icon, so we do not know what extension to specify.

Mime file:

  • Should be copied to /usr/share/mime/packages/, local user location is ~/.local/share/mime/packages/.

  • After copying you should run update-mime-database /usr/share/mime or equivalent for local user location.

  • Note that our mime XML file describes "model/x3d+binary", but it's not yet listed in our desktop file --- because we do not handle x3db yet.

Thumbnailer script:

  • It works :)

  • Beware that loading arbitrary 3D scene may take a lot of time, consume a lot of memory and CPU power.

    Although we try to be fast, and some things are specially optimized for screenshot (namely, RendererOptimization is always roNone when generating a screenshot for a single image), but stil some things could be optimized more (like octree construction should be avoided for a screenshot).

    But no amount of optimization will make loading fast for any scene. And we can't really detect every resource use (CPU, memory, time) and abort model loading (parsing, loading textures, rendering to OpenGL) --- since this is quite complicated and delegates work to many libraries, OpenGL foremost.

    The bottom line is: making a thumbnail of 3D scene may be resource-consuming, and there's really nothing we can do about it. Nautilus should automatically terminate thumbnailer that runs too long, so this is not critical problem --- but you may experience slowdowns when using this thumbnailer.

You may want to run

killall gnome-panel
killall nautilus

to refresh icons and mime types everywhere without relogging to GNOME. (If anyone knows a cleaner to do this, please let me know.) Without these kills, only the menu entry is actomatically updated. I.e. changes to *.desktop files dir are picked up automatically, but icon and mime files not (it seems).