Comment 3 for bug 704187

First off, I apologize if the following post is hard to understand/comprehend; I have a hard time conveying thoughts and ideas using text. I'll attach screenshots that try to explain the written steps.

I have the solution to this bug. The reason why the "wine application launcher" is being shown as the launcher icon is because the wine app is being opened from within the wine prefix. That means that wine is being launched, and then the windows application is being launched inside of it. By default wine attempts to launch the .lnk shortcut file that points to the .exe in the wine folder.

The solution is to create a .desktop file in a location that is looked at by the launcher and to change the command so that wine directly launches the application's executable. Below is a tutorial on how to add Microsoft Word 2007 to the Unity launcher:

1) Open the following: Applications -> System -> Main Menu
2) Highlight "Applications" on the left side list
3) Click the "New Menu" and in the popup box give it a name of "wine-apps" or something of the sort. The launcher will look in this folder and add any items in it to the "All Applications" portion of the launcher later on...
4) On the left side list expand the following: Applications -> Wine -> Programs -> Microsoft Office
5) Highlight the following: Microsoft Office Word 2007
6) Drag and Drop into the menu on the left hand side that you created earlier in step 3
5) Click on the menu on the left side of the window that was created in step 3
6) You should see the Microsoft office word launcher on the right side of the window
9) Highlight it and click on "Properties".
10) Change the command box to match the following (change %USERNAME% to match yours accordingly):
  wine "/home/%USERNAME%/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/WINWORD.EXE"
11) If the icon is the default wine icon, click on it and browse to this directory (all Wine application icons should be located here): /home/%USERNAME%/.local/share/icons
11) Click on the "Close" button twice to close out of the main menu app.
12) Reboot the computer, or log off and back on. This will allow the launcher to repull the proper .desktop files and it should populate the "All Applications" with the launcher icon you just made
13) Open the launcher icon and once the program has loaded in Wine you should be able to right click the icon in the launcher and pin it. Also the icon in the launcher should have the same icon as the application does in windows.

That is a lot of steps, and it's rather time consuming, but it does work. I just started using ubuntu about a month ago and i just installed the netbook remix version yesterday night. So if there was a much shorter/condensed way of doing that, then please let me know.

This above steps should work with any windows applications that are installed in wine. The instrucions will just have to modified to reflect whatever you are trying to add to the launcher. I did the above steps with word and excel and I could pin both to the unity launcher and I could have both word and excel running at the same time and both opened from the Unity launcher.

Enjoy,
Brandon B.