Adding a Python script to Application Launcher

Question

I'm using Gnome 2.32.0 in Ubuntu 10.10 and I need to execute a Python script via Gnome custom application launcher. I added an application launcher to the panel and pointed the relevant Python script, but every time I try to run it, I get an error message along these lines:

There was an error creating the child process for this terminal
Failed to execute child process "/home/dananjaya/xkcd_viewer/xkcd_gui.py" (Permission denied)

What is the correct way of adding a Python script to the application launcher? What is wrong in this case? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

It seems like you don't have permissions to execute the script. There are two possible solutions:

1. Prefix the command with python, e. g. python /path/to/myscript.py instead of /path/to/myscript.py. That way, the python interpreter will read your script instead of the executed script calling the python interpreter, and the permissions on the script may stay the same.

2. Enable execution-permissions for the script. Right-click the script in the file manager, choose properties and tick the execution permission under the permissions tab. This solution implies that your script can be identified by the shell as a python-script. To do this, you must place #!/usr/bin/env python on the first line of the file.