Unity Launcher Item displays incorrectly when running Picasa or other applications under Wine

[Peter Curtis]

If there are several applications available to be run under Wine (ie with launcher files (.desktop) in ~/.local/share/applications) the Unity Launcher display seems to get confused about which Wine application(s) are running. I first noticed this with Picasa which showed up as another window of Dreamweaver or Paint Shop Pro 4 with an extra tick at the side of their launcher item if one of them was already running. Clicking the launcher item led to the display of the two windows running the completely different applications. Further investigation shows Picasa and other Wine applications, when started, will often display the launcher item for a different Wine application.

The problem only seems to occur if the launcher files (.desktop) in ~/.local/share/applications contains a line specifying a StartupWMClass=Wine . A workaround is to delete or commented out ALL the StartupWMClass=Wine lines. The Picasa launcher is different if you install the linux version and calls a script /opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/picasa rather than directly launching the application and does not have a StartupWMClass=Wine anywhere I can find in the picasa script or any of the other script files in the folder. Removing the lines from all the other .desktop files is however sufficient to allow picasa to be used normally.

This was reproducible on the two machines I checked - in both cases they were updated earlier Ubuntu distributions versions but in different ways, one by a series of regular distribution upgrades, the other by a fresh install install of 11.04 but using a separate home folder which was left unformatted so the .desktop files, .wine folder etc., were in existence.