Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Watchtower Library disappears from Ubuntu Unity bar

***   Update for Ubuntu 64 bit users below   ***

I noticed a bug for Wine applications and the Unity side bar found in Ubuntu 12.04.

If you use Unity, you might have had this problem too.

Wine applications for some reason do not want to stay in the Unity sidebar. After several reboots I noticed every time the Watchtower Library Icon I had put there just disappeared after reboot.

My solution was to use a program called alacarte. You can get alacarte by looking in the Ubuntu Software Center for it, or by typing: sudo apt-get install alacarte in the terminal.

In alacarte, first you click on the category you want to add your new menu entry in. I chose "other" simply because none of the pre-defined category options really fits with the Watchtower Library.

You can choose "new menu" and make a new category if you want. Since my goal was simply to get the icon to stay put on the Unity bar, other worked fine for this.

click to enlarge picture

I then clicked inside the other category menu entries to make sure alacarte registered me as making changes in that category. I then clicked on the button marked 'new item'.

I got a box that looked like this:

click to enlarge picture

Inside that box, in the name field i put "Watchtower Library 2011" (without the quote marks, of coarse)

Then in the Command field I put this command:

wine /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe

This command will change for every person. My account name for Ubuntu is denny. If your account name where oscar for instance, then you would want it to look like this:

wine /home/oscar/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe.

I then changed my icon by clicking on the icon button on the left of the new item window. Usually this looks like a springboard.

Once I did this, I was prompted with a file prompt box, and I had to tell alacarte where the icon I wanted was.

Here's what that box looks like:

click to enlarge picture

Once all that is done, I hit ok, and closed out alacarte.

Now when you look for Watchtower Library in the search box at the top of the Unity bar, you will see 2 entries for it. The one made by you, and the one made by Wine.

The one made by you will not have the "Watchtower Library 2011 - English" name, it will simply be what you named it. If you followed my lead, it will be called "Watchtower Library 2011".

Here's my example:

click to enlarge picture
Once you drag the proper icon (or menu entry, whatever you want to call this) to the Unity bar (and it seats itself) it will be there no matter how many times you reboot.

As a side note, this will need to be changed every year. It will be rather simple, just go back into alacarte, and edit your menu entry in "other" or whatever category you installed it in.

The change will look like this once you uninstall the 2011 library and install the 2012 library:

wine /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2012/E/wtlibrary.exe

*Remember, replace "denny" with your username, unless your username is denny. :)

This change should be the same for recurring years, i.e. 2013, 2014, etc... That is unless the brothers make a serious change as to how the library is stored in the /home/(username here)/.wine/ directory.

I hope this has been of help to you, if you have any questions, feel free to comment here, or email me at dennygoot@gmail.com
-Denny

***   Update for Ubuntu 64 bit users   ***

I found out, by accident, that my little wine command above only works for 32 bit version of Ubuntu.

Here is my 64 bit correction:

wine /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe

Again, you have to swap "denny" for your username. I.E., if your username is susan, it will look like this:

wine /home/susan/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe

The only change is that Program\ Files\ now says Program\ Files\ (x86).

Without this, you will NOT get wine running the Watchtower Library in your alacarte menu entry.

-Denny

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