Labview Icons under GNOME

[anshuljain]

This is something that I've been struggling for a while unde GNOME. I'm running Labview on Mandriva 2008.1 with the GNOME DE. I cannot get a Labview icon for a .vi file extension at all...it works automagically after install under KDE (only KDE3 and not KDE4). I know of a command called gtk-update-icon-cache which updates the icon cache..but I am absolutely lost.

Can someone suggest?

-Anshul

[AdamKemp]

LabVIEW 8.6 does not officially support KDE 4 because none of our officially supported distributions use KDE 4 by default (as far as I know). We test with the defaults for the distributions which we officially support. So for now my only suggestion is to either use KDE 3 or live without icons (sorry). It is kind of frustrating that these things keep changing.

We will look into fixing it in our future installers. Thank you for letting us know.

[anshuljain]

Adam,

I can understand under KDE4, however it seems like Labview does install something for GNOME Desktop support alongwith KDE desktop support during the installation process. Now, all desktop icons and mime types for GNOME and KDE fall under the Freedesktop.org guidelines. I wouldn't imagine that its all that difficult...however its clear that this doesn't work "out of the box"...yet.

As you've mentioned..KDE4 isn't supported...but GNOME is supported alongwith KDE. All of your supported distros...RedHat, Opensuse and Mandriva come in KDE and GNOME flavors.

-Anshul

[Randy_H]

Anshul,

What version of LabVIEW are you working with? This will help us narrow down some things. In the last couple of releases we have improved the handling of the icons and such according to the Freedesktop.org standards. We have also noticed that each of the distros and then each windowing manager deals with it a little bit differently according to the standard ( for instance, SUSE 10.3 and later will only display a menu item under its parent menu if there is more than one item in the parent menu, otherwise it displays the item instead of the parent; SUSE 10.2 does not do this).

Randy Hoskin

[anshuljain]

Randy,

I'm running Mandriva 2008.1 GNOME...more specifically GNOME 2.22

-Anshul

[Randy_H]

Anshul,

What LabVIEW version? 8.0, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6?

Randy Hoskin

[AdamKemp]

"Standards" on Linux are a bit of a misnomer. There are groups like freedesktop.org which try to come up with recommendations for everyone to follow, but not everyone follows them exactly, and even if they do the standards change over time in sometimes incompatible ways. This is one of the big reasons that we can't claim to support just any distribution. There's too much difference in how different distributions do things for us to confidently say that our products will work on any distribution of Linux. You are using a supported distribution, but you're also using a non-default configuration (using Gnome on Mandriva) which we probably did not test, and apparently they do things differently.

[EWTech]

What icons are you trying to use? Icon file types seem to be at least somewhat universal. Both KDE versions and Gnome allow the user to open up a file browser and creat a sort of association to the icon for a given desktop icon. The icons that LabVIEW uses internally should be the same regardless but the icon on the desktop can be any icon file on your system. KDE 3 icons do work on KDE 4. The only difference on the desktop is the location of the source location for system, application and mime type icons. You can create a shortrcut on KDE 4 by right clicking the mouse and then browsing to a location to select an icon file. I'm using openSuse 11.1 and this does not seem to be an issue with KDE 4.

Where these icons are supposed to be located in Gnome I can not tell you at the moment as I'm at work and my Linux system is at home...

Bob

[EWTech]

I'll try installing Gnome when I get home. I have the libraries to run some of the nicer Gnome programs on KDE. I don't have the Gnome desktop as an option right now but it's fairly quick to make it available.

[anshuljain]

Adam,

Is GNOME a "non-default configuration" under Mandriva? This is indeed surprising and unless I haven't read the support requirements for Labview on Linux properly...there isn't any mention of the Desktop Environment anywhere. All thats mentioned is the fact that 3 distros supported.

Besides, if GNOME were indeed not supported...then what use would a package be with details?:-

labview86-desktop - LabVIEW KDE and GNOME desktop support​                                                                                                                        
LabVIEW icons and MIME config files for use under the KDE or GNOME desktop environments.

Randy,

I'm using Labview 8.6.

EWTech,

I can right click on the file and select the icon with no difficulty. But doing that for 100 or so more VIs is a pain!

I know that icons under GNOME do not work at all..across RedHat/CentOS, Mandriva and Opensuse. What I'm looking for is a solution or a workaround (and it exists) - gtk-update-icon-cache is the command and I dont know how to exactly use it. We all do stuff thats "unsupported" (like installing KAL on Ubuntu) and get it to work...and thats the purpose of a community like this to share such information. My query falls under that and not under "support" and "non-support" issues.

-Anshul