Creating a desktop shortcut for a specific roslaunch

roslaunch

asked 2014-03-03 04:48:56 -0600

heyfred
122 ●10 ●11 ●16

updated 2016-10-24 09:02:39 -0600

ngrennan
1 ●1 ●1

Is it possible to create a graphical shortcut for a specific roslaunch file that can be run by a user without any terminal knowledge by double clicking on an icon?

I've tried to create a .desktop file, a .command file and a bash file but none of these seem to run the program and leave it running. The .desktop file seems to get closest but doesn't appear to respect the environment variables specified in my .bashrc file.

Thanks for any help

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answered 2014-03-03 05:11:22 -0600

dornhege

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"An icon" is quite unspecific as that highly depends on what Desktop you use.

The safest and portable thing for me seems to make a bash script that you call from whatever icon/launcher/etc. This should work in general by just calling roslaunch. You might need to manually source your .bashrc within the script. That should fix the problem that you observed.

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answered 2015-01-04 08:19:28 -0600

Oded
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The problem is that the .desktop doesn’t run the .bashrc sources, so your application doesn't know what ROS is along with all of its function (rosrun, roslaunch, etc.)

One way getting around it is adding to the exec command the source of ROS.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=true
TerminalOptions=bash
Exec=bash -c "source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash;source ~/YOUR/CATKIN/WORKSPACE/devel/setup.bash;/path/to/script.sh"
Icon=/if/you/want/one/icon.png
Name=rosapp