Comment 14 for bug 723861

I am confused by the advise above to launch the binary manually. I am using Natty and currently do not have gnome-panel installed, and thus the binary itself is not working. The terminal output prompts me thusly:

gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new <launcher name>
The program 'gnome-desktop-item-edit' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

So if gnome-panel will not be installed in Oneiric, I still don't know how to create a .desktop launcher file on the desktop.

It does not get much easier than right-clicking on the desktop to create a program launcher. I don't understand why you are removing this functionality. If it actually caused some sort of problem in user testing, please, educate those users, change the wording on the right-click menu if necessary, because removing it creates a different set of usability issues.