#254 SCID Icon does not display on the dash when SCID 5.1.0 is launched under Ubuntu 24.04.1

[Steve Cohen]

I have built, and can run, scid-5.1.0. In issue #252, I complained that I couldn't do the build from the downloaded archive, or from a git clone. Tobias told me to try
'sudo apt-get install libx11-dev' and try again ... . I didn't do this because the computer I was trying to install scid on was a lemon with numerous hardware issues and I shipped it back to the vendor. I then thought I'd try building it on my trusty old Lenovo Thinkpad running Ubuntu 24.04.1. It built without a glitch. Evidently, libx11-dev had been installed on the old machine.

Probably, this requirement should be documented in your build instructions.

However, that is not the reason for this bug report.

In spite of having built a runnable executable, and it runs just fine, there is still one problem. The icon it displays in the dash is just a gear, as for a script, and it identifies itself as start.tcl. I have created an app-launching .desktop file, and placed it in $HOME/.local/share/applications. This puts it on the Show Apps grid, and it is launchable from there, but the icon persists as a gear - see attached screenshot.

Here is my latest iteration of the scid.desktop file. I've used several different models of this file. As I mentioned above, this file allows a launchable executable to be placed in the Show Apps grid, but the instructions there, particularly the Icon instruction, does not succeed in making a scid icon be the icon displayed on the dash when it is running.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=5.1.0
Type=Application
Hidden=false
Terminal=false
Icon=/home/scohen/scid5.1.0-src/scid-5.1.0/Scid.app/Contents/scid/scid.gif
Name=SCID
Exec=/home/scohen/scid5.1.0-src/scid-5.1.0/Scid.app/Contents/scid/scid %f
Keywords=Chess;PGN;convert
Categories=Game;BoardGame;
MimeType=application/pgn;application/x-chess-pgn;application/x-pgn
Comment=Free chess database application
Path=
StartupNotify=false

Ideally we'd have a packaged executable to run under Linux, but, failing that, at least we should have instructions for making the dash icon be a scid icon rather than a gear.