[Phosh] .desktop with "Terminal=True": xterm not found

[langfingaz]

Actual behavior

When I start a desktop entry from the application drawer that has Terminal=true in it's .desktop file (e.g. Htop), then this application does not show up.

When I start the same application with

gtk-launch htop.desktop

then I get the following error:

sh: line 1: exec: xterm not found

Expected behavior

The installed terminal, in my case KGX should open up and the application should be running in there.

My setup

The above behavior occurs on my PinePhone with DanctNIX Arch Linuxarm and Phosh as the desktop environment.

I think Plasma Mobile is not affected as another terminal is used there.

Possible solution

I had first submitted this issue report at source.puri.sm and they helped me out a bit:

• The problem is that as of now KGX is not included in gdesktopappinfo.c of glib2. But the "the termapp problem is well known and proper solutions are being worked on".
• A quick fix for me was archieved with sudo ln -s /usr/bin/kgx /usr/bin/konsole. Maybe this fix could be included in your PKGBUILD for KGX? One would just need to add this line to package(){}:

  ln -sf /usr/bin/kgx "$pkgdir"/usr/bin/konsole

---

What do you think? Should I create a pull request with the proposed changes?

[Danct12]

I think Plasma Mobile is not affected as another terminal is used there.

It is affected as Plasma Mobile image uses qmlkonsole which technically is not konsole.

The problem is that as of now KGX is not included in gdesktopappinfo.c of glib2. But the "the termapp problem is well known and proper solutions are being worked on".

We can fork glib2 and make the change, the issue is that we need to keep up with upstream and the rebase process is not automated. During that moment, something might break.

A quick fix for me was archieved with sudo ln -s /usr/bin/kgx /usr/bin/konsole. Maybe this fix could be included in your PKGBUILD for KGX?

No. Doing that will create a file conflict for the actual Konsole package and what if they use some sort of hybrid plasma + phosh setup? (very weird use case I know, but apparently there exist people doing that)

[langfingaz]

The problem is that kgx is not detected in gdesktopappinfo.c. But creating a symlink in /usr/bin to any of these terminal emulators should work:

          if (check == NULL)
            check = g_find_program_in_path ("tilix");
          if (check == NULL)
            check = g_find_program_in_path ("konsole");
          if (check == NULL)
            check = g_find_program_in_path ("nxterm");
          if (check == NULL)
            check = g_find_program_in_path ("color-xterm");
          if (check == NULL)
            check = g_find_program_in_path ("rxvt");
          if (check == NULL)
            check = g_find_program_in_path ("dtterm");

I have just randomly picked konsole and it worked for me on Phosh.

But I agree: This symlink hack is not nice as it does not work when konsole is installed.

A glib2 fork seems like a lot of effort. Maybe we should check out how this is done by Manjaro for PinePhone?

Or we could pick one of the above terminal emulators which is more unlikely to be used (e.g. /usr/bin/dtterm) and add a conflicts=(dtterm) to the PKGBUILD. This does however not solve the problem completely but might be better than using konsole.

[Danct12]

I have checked glib2 from Manjaro side, it's all unchanged.

But make a symlink to dtterm as a workaround seems to be a good idea as we don't want to manually rebase glib2 every time there's a new update.

It's also a very ancient terminal emulator that nobody uses. Even if they want a CDE on Arch setup, they wouldn't be doing it on the Phosh image, but rather on barebone.