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Fast App Launching with GNOME Do

Issue 179

From Issue #179
March 2009

Mar 01, 2009  By Kyle Rankin
 in
When your panel is littered with application shortcuts or you press Alt-F2 every few minutes to launch a new program, check out a better, faster way to launch your programs—GNOME Do.
Other Plugins

GNOME Do includes so many great plugins, it's difficult to choose which ones to list. Some other useful plugins allow you to index all of your Firefox bookmarks or Evolution contacts, upload photos to Flickr or ImageShack, update your Twitter status, search through your Rhythmbox music collection, index Tomboy notes and even connect to remote hosts over SSH. And, that's just the list of official plugins. GNOME Do also has many third-party plugins that extend its functionality even further.

I have to say that after trying all sorts of different methods to launch applications, GNOME Do has won me over. If I'm already in a terminal, I still sometimes will launch an application there, but I've switched to GNOME Do to launch most of my programs and even use it as a replacement for a file browser when I want to open a file quickly. If you find that you have a number of key bindings set up to launch programs for you, or if you are tired of reaching for the mouse every time you want to run a program or open a file, I recommend giving GNOME Do a try.

Kyle Rankin is a Senior Systems Administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of a number of books, including Knoppix Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks for O'Reilly Media. He is currently the president of the North Bay Linux Users' Group.

______________________

Kyle Rankin is a systems architect; and the author of DevOps Troubleshooting, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks, and Ubuntu Hacks.

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How to launch your own executables?

ps1946's picture
Submitted by ps1946 (not verified) on Tue, 07/28/2009 - 10:03.

I am a new Ubuntu user, migrating from Windows.

I would like to launch my own programs using Gnome-Do but so far could not make it happen.
Say I write a program "~/projects/hello.c" and compile it into "~/projects/a.out".
To test it I open a terminal and type "~/projects/a.out" at the prompt. Everything works as expected.

Using Do to do the same simple task doesn't seem to work:

1. open Gnome-Do (space) and type "terminal".
2. type to activate Do's right window
3. type "~/projects/a.out"
4. Gnome-Do closes, nothing happens.

Gnome-Do by default loads

Kyle's picture
Submitted by Kyle (not verified) on Tue, 07/28/2009 - 11:06.

Gnome-Do by default loads things that are in the Gnome menu, so if you want your app to be launched from Gnome-Do you will have to add it to the Gnome menu (System->Preferences->Main Menu).

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