Hi all--
I'm trying to add a Java program to the Gnome menu using Alacarte. After much banging of head against monitor, I finally got Gnome to start the program up from the menu. However, it also loads up a blank terminal window at the same time. If I close the blank terminal, the program gets killed too. This is annoying, and takes up screen real estate, but I have no idea if it's Java or Gnome at fault. Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Additional question: Alacarte and I have been having some serious issues. If anybody can point me toward a manual that doesn't assume I'm a total newbie, I'd be grateful. (The Gnome manual barely covers Alacarte, and doesn't yield any new info.) If anybody can tell me what the %f and %u arguments means in a launcher command, I'd be doubly so.

Thanks,
Adam

I always get two terminal consoles when I use the command line. I don't know why. Does the program work in the active console window? My stuf usually works okay the two windows close together when I shut down the active terminal console window.

Sonshine Penguin

It sounds like what happens if you click on an icon for a script, and that script is a wrapper for the gui program.
You might want to compare your menu item with another program that launches a wrapper script as well. One example is "firefox".

Thank you guys. Unfortunately, this has become a moot question, because my laptop was stolen last week. (I left it in my car near a sketchy area of town in plain site in my back seat, and I just wasn't thinking straight because fasting for Yom Kippur had *just* ended.) But for intellectual curiosity's sake:

The program being run was java--plain old java--that was in turn running a program that was the actual app I was running. I looked at other launchers in the menu, but the only thing I saw that was different were those wacky %f and %u arguments. (Still don't know what those mean, or where any of that information might be written down.) All I saw was that the one launcher I made from scratch was doing something that the others didn't. Yeah, I think something somewhere was likely considering java to be a wrapper. But why? Is there some magic trick to making your own menu items, that's not obvious?