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I installed VirtualBox via Ubuntu software center on Ubuntu 16.04 but I couldn't find it in search. So I search it through disk and I find it. My question is why this happened and how to fix it. I installed some softwares and some of them will appear on search and some not. I am using Ubuntu software center instead of Ubuntu software ( because it couldn't launch).

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  • Did you log out/in afterwards? May 22, 2016 at 7:08
  • I restarted and virtualbox can be find in unity search but Should I do this for every program ? Isn't this abnormal?
    – CatCoder
    May 22, 2016 at 7:12
  • No, it's not normal, but I've seen this happen before on some systems (not mine). To be honest, I have no clue why this happens on some systems, but it does. May 22, 2016 at 7:14
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    Seems to be a bug: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1506744 May 22, 2016 at 7:25

1 Answer 1

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As first open a terminal (ctrl+alt+t) and check if there is a file called virtualbox.desktop in /usr/share/applications. You can do that by:

ls -l /usr/share/applications/virtualbox.desktop

which should give you the following output:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 861 Apr 28 16:07 /usr/share/applications/virtualbox.desktop

If you got the prompted result on first try you might simply have to reboot your machine and test if it shows up in the unity dash then.

If not browse the directory itself if there might be an oracle-virtualbox.desktop file (cd /usr/share/applications && ls). If there is none you can create one with:

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/virtualbox.desktop

where you paste in the following block (paste in terminal is ctrl+shift+v):

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Name=Oracle VM VirtualBox
GenericName=Virtual Machine
Type=Application
Exec=VirtualBox %U
TryExec=VirtualBox
Keywords=virtualization;
Keywords[de]=Virtualisierung;
MimeType=application/x-virtualbox-vbox;application/x-virtualbox-vbox-extpack;application/x-virtualbox-ovf;application/x-virtualbox-ova;
DocPath=file:///usr/share/doc/virtualbox-5.0/UserManual.pdf
Icon=virtualbox
Categories=Emulator;System;
Comment=Run several virtual systems on a single host computer

After that make sure the file has the right permissions by:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/share/applications/virtualbox.desktop

If all that fails you might have to reinstall virtualbox by:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall virtualbox
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  • Thanks for your answer I face this problem with other softwares too.
    – CatCoder
    May 22, 2016 at 6:45
  • The procedure should be the same for other software too, only if its a terminal only software you might not find it in dash.
    – Videonauth
    May 22, 2016 at 6:48
  • All of softwares that I installed are in /usr/share/application but unity cant't find them. I think the problem is somewhere else.
    – CatCoder
    May 22, 2016 at 6:52

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