Fedora Desktop Entry Guidelines

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The vendor prefix (desktop-file-install --vendor=...) must be set to "fedora".

All Categories must be from the standard set (see below), with the exception that the "Application" category should be included where appropriate (ie. for everything that is supposed to be shown in the menus) for backwards compatibility even though it is not listed as a standard category.

Additionally, all Fedora packages must contain the "X-Fedora" category.

For packages that exist in Red Hat Linux, the categories must be the same as Red Hat's (+ X-Fedora).

For packages that are considered essential for end users, the "X-Red-Hat-Base" Category must be added because that's currently the only way to get them listed in the top level menus instead of "Extras" on RH8 or "More foo..." on RH9.

Remember to to enable startup-notification:

Gnome 2.2 applications: add "StartupNotify=true" to the .desktop file.
KDE applications: add "X-KDE-StartupNotify=true" to the .desktop file.
For other applications you need to enable the compatibility mode: start the application in question, run "xprop | grep WM_CLASS" and click your application window, then add "StartupWMClass=<string>" to the .desktop file where <string> is one of the strings xprop shows. For an example of this, see redhat-word-processor.desktop.

desktop-file-validate from the desktop-file-utils package can be used to validate .desktop files.

There are several scriptlets that may be needed at post(un)install time related to desktop entries and their icons, see ScriptletSnippets for more info.

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Extras/FedoraDesktopEntryGuidelines

Fedora Desktop Entry Guidelines

References