Manually installing launcher icons for Xilinx tools on a Gnome desktop

So I installed Vivado on my Centos 6.5 64-bit Linux machine, and even though it promised to install icons on my desktop, it didn’t. This is how I installed them manually. There is surely a simpler way, as the special launch bash scripts I created must be somewhere. But I didn’t bother looking.

So it consists of generating four files, all in all, as follows.

First, as root, create these two files, and make them executable by all:

/usr/local/bin/run-vivado as follows:

#!/bin/bash
. /opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2014.1/settings64.sh
vivado &

And /usr/local/bin/run-sdk:

#!/bin/bash
. /opt/Xilinx/SDK/2014.1/settings64.sh
xsdk &

The path to Xilinx’ installation is /opt/Xilinx, of course. Adjust this to where your installation was made, and you should pick the settings32.sh file if you’re running on a 32-bit machine.

And next, we have the launchers, both to be placed in the Desktop directory of the ordinary user who should have these on the desktop.

The file named “Vivado 2014.1.desktop” goes

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2014.1/doc/images/vivado_logo.ico
Name[en_US]=Vivado 2014.1
Exec=/usr/local/bin/run-vivado
Path=/home/myself/vivado-outputs/
Name=Vivado 2014.1
StartupNotify=true

and “Xilinx SDK.desktop” is

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/Xilinx/SDK/2014.1/data/sdk/images/sdk_logo.ico
Name[en_US]=Xilinx SDK
Exec=/usr/local/bin/run-sdk
Name=Xilinx SDK
StartupNotify=true

I’ve marked the StartupNotify assignment in red, because this is what makes the mouse pointer turn into “busy” when the program is launched, until the splash window appears. It’s important for Vivado in particular, which takes some time to start up.

Also, the Path assignment in the Vivado launcher sets the directory at which Vivado runs, which should be changed to a directory that exists, and is a convenient place to dump all log files that Vivado generates.

A list of possible assignments in desktop launchers can be found on this page.