The New Hotness

The Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian PIXEL Desktop UI (not to be confused with the Google Pixel phone) descends from LXDE, with all the advantages & disadvantages that entails. One nuisance seems to be the inability to create a launcher for a non-standard program.

The stock task bar (or whatever it’s called) has a few useful launchers and you can add a launcher for a program installed through the usual Add/Remove Software function, as shown by the VLC icon:

Adding a bCNC launcher requires a bit of legerdemain, because it’s not found in the RPi repositories. Instead, install bCNC according to its directions:

… install various pre-requisites as needed …
pip2 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC 

Which is also how you upgrade to the latest & greatest version, as needed.

You then launch bCNC from inside a terminal:

python2 -m bCNC

The installation includes all the bits & pieces required to create a launcher; they’re just not in the right places.

So put them there:

sudo cp ./.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/bCNC/bCNC.png /usr/share/icons/
sudo cp .local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/bCNC/bCNC.desktop /usr/share/applications/bCNC.desktop

The bCNC.desktop file looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=bCNC
Comment=bCNC Controller
Exec=bCNC
Icon=bCNC.png
Path=
Terminal=true
StartupNotify=false
Name[en_US]=bCNC

Set Terminal=false if you don’t want a separate terminal window and don’t care about any of the messages bCNC writes to the console during its execution. However, those messages may provide the only hint about happened as bCNC falls off the rails.

With all that in place, it turns out LXDE creates a user-specific panel configuration file only when you change the default system panel configuration. Add a VLC launcher to create the local ~/.config/lxpanel/LXDE-pi/panels/panel file.

With that ball rolled, then add the bCNC launcher:

nano .config/lxpanel/LXDE-pi/panels/panel
… add this stanza …
Plugin {
  type=launchbar
  Config {
    Button {
      id=bCNC.desktop
    }
  }
}

Log out, log back in again, and the bCNC icon should appear:

Click it and away you go:

At least you (and I) will start closer to the goal when something else changes …