I have recently moved to CentOS7 and thus GNOME3. In Astronomy, we work with FITS images. These images are not recognized and by default they are opened with Gimp (which is not what we want!). The most common program to open such images is SAO ds9, which is downloaded as an executable.
I can open images in the command line and there is no problem. In GNOME2.x, I would simply click "open with" and write the command to open FITS images with the ds9 -mecube command and there was no problem. But in GNOME 3, there is no such option. After some searching I thought that creating a .desktop file would be the best solution. So I made this desktop file in: /usr/share/applications/saods9.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=SAO ds9
Encoding=UTF-8
Comment=Open ds9 as multiextension data cube
Exec=/usr/local/bin/ds9 -mecube %f
Terminal=false
Categories=Graphics;Science;
The SAO ds9 option was added to the programs list in the Open With menu, but when I click on it, nothing happens. It is also included under the Graphics applications in the "Applications" menu and when I click it there it opens, but it doesn't open a file when I click on it.
I wanted to know what I am not doing or doing wrong? thanks in advance.
Thanks to Mpstark's post, I recognized that this is a CentOS (Redhat) issue and not general.
So because of this and other problems, I was encouraged to get a better understanding of GNU/Linux so I moved to Arch Linux (with X.org 1.16 and GNOME 3.12). Where I could build the OS my self (and thus understand it), instead of ignorantly relying on what RedHat chooses to give me. Being so closer to the upstream developers, this issue did not exist there (as it didn't exist in Ubuntu): By simply putting the .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/, GNOME recognized the program and successfully opened the FITS image with SAO ds9.