Adding shortcuts to your desktop

This brief tip will show you how to create a shortcut to the GIMP application. I am going to assume you have basic experience with GNOME and know simple commands like cd and ln.

Change to the users .gnome-desktop under his home diretory.

cd /home/user/.gnome-desktop

The shortcuts on the desktop are just symlinks under this directory. Let's create our symlink.

ln -s /usr/bin/gimp GIMP

This will create a symlink GIMP to the gimp binary. Now right click somewhere on the background and rescan the Desktop. The default executable icon should be on your desktop with "GIMP" as the name. Now let's change the icon.

Right click on the icon and click on properties.

Click on the options tab.

The executable icon shows up with a border. Click on the icon. This will let you pick which file you want to replace the default icon with.

We want the gimp icon. It's under /usr/share/pixmaps called gnome-gimp.png. Select this file and click ok.

Now the icon should have changed to GIMP's logo. You can double click the icon to launch GIMP. Now that you have GIMP running, you can create your own icons and use them instead of the default. Hope this tip helps you.

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