Long Term Storage

As you use Ubuntu, you are bound to come across a time when you want to build a custom file association.  Inevitably, you are bound to make a mistake in that file association and end up with a second entry in your available applications that is wrong.

I managed to do this while installing uTorrent via CrossOver.  The entry in the available application field also had a funky ^C5 something something something for the “mirco” which translated itself as the entry name automagically.

When I managed to get it all sorted out, I ended up with two entries in there.  One working with a crap-tastic name and the other not working with the right now.  That is when I started digging into how to manually create/remove those entires.

It turns out that it is very easy.

The available associations are located in ~/.local/share/applications

It should be fairly obvious which one you need to edit/delete when you list the contents of that directory.

This is the resulting file I had after correcting and assigning the icon.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Icon=/home/jon/.cxoffice/utorrent/windata/Desktop.C^5E3A^5Fwindows^5Fprofiles^5Fcrossover^5FDesktop/^C2^B5Torrent.xpm
Exec="/home/jon/.cxoffice/utorrent/desktopdata/cxmenu/StartMenu.C^5E3A^5Fwindows^5Fprofiles^5Fcrossover^5FStart^2BMenu/^C2^B5Torrent" %f
Name=uTorrent
Comment=Custom definition for crossover uTorrent
NoDisplay=true


If you use this, a couple of things to note. My username is jon and the bottle I created in CrossOver is called utorrent. If you adjust it for those two changes, you should be able to copy/paste and have a file association ready to go for uTorrent including a spiffy icon.