xdg-utils --------- The xdg-utils package is a set of simple scripts that provide basic desktop integration functions for any Free Desktop, such as Linux. They are intended to provide a set of defacto standards. This means that: * Third party software developers can rely on these xdg-utils for all of their simple integration needs. * Developers of desktop environments can make sure that their environments are well supported If a desktop developer wants to be certain that their environment functions with all third party software, then can simply make sure that these utilities work properly in their environment. This will hopefully mean that 'third tier' window managers such as XFCE and Blackbox can reach full parity with Gnome and KDE in terms of third party ISV support. * Distribution vendors can provide custom versions of these utilities If a distribution vendor wishes to have unusual systems, they can provide custom scripts, and the third party software should still continue to work. OVERVIEW: --------- The following tools are included in xdg-utils 1.0: xdg-desktop-menu Install desktop menu items xdg-desktop-icon Install icons to the desktop xdg-icon-resource Install icon resources xdg-mime Query information about file type handling and install descriptions for new file types xdg-open Open a file or URL in the user's preferred application xdg-email Send mail using the user's preferred e-mail composer xdg-screensaver Control the screensaver BUILD: ------ Building is not required, all tools are located in the scripts/ subdirectory and are ready to be used. You can optionally choose to install the scripts to a target directory. To do this, you could issue the following commands: ./configure [--prefix=<your-place-here>] make install that would cause the scripts to be installed to <your-place-here>/bin USE: ---- Although we expect that these scripts will generally come as part of the operating system, we recommend that you package the scripts that your application needs along with your product as a fallback. For this purpose please obtain the original version of the xdg-utils from http://portland.freedesktop.org. The xdg-utils scripts that are distributed by operating systems vendors may have been tuned for their particular operating system and may not work on the same broad variety of operating systems as the original version. We recommend that you place these scripts in a directory, and then add that directory to the end of the PATH. So, let's say that you're writing your post installation script, and you want to create a menu on any xdg-util compliant environment. Let's further assume that you've just installed to $INSTALL_DIR, and that your menu desktop file is in $INSTALL_DIR/desktop/icon.desktop. Finally, let's say that you've included the xdg-utils package in your installation in $INSTALL_DIR/xdg-utils. Then a simple post install script could look like this: export PATH=$PATH:$INSTALL_DIR/xdg-utils xdg-desktop-menu install $INSTALL_DIR/mycompany-myapp.desktop And now your product has a menu on any XDG compliant desktop! Note that we strongly recommend using this method - that is, putting your copy of the xdg-utils at the end of the path, and then invoking them without a specific path name. That will allow your users and their system providers to use custom versions of the xdg-utils to adjust for system specific differences. If you wish to absolutely force the issue and only use the versions you shipped, you could instead hard code the path to the version you bundle with your application. We strongly recommend against this, as it will make your product obsolete more quickly than is necessary.