Hi,

I installed the FF3 on my new Debian, and part of the installation guidance is to save a file named firefox.desktop on the desktop, which should act like a shortcut to the FF. The file content is:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Mozilla Firefox Browser
Comment=lightweight browser based on mozilla
Exec=firefox
Icon=firefox.png
Terminal=0
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base;X-Red-Hat-Base-Only;
I have done all of this.

My questions are:
1) what kind of file is this? is it a script?
2) do I have to change the file mode attributes before running it?

is this a personal or system wide installation?

if this is a system wide install, did you create a symlink to your firefox installation?
create one with the following command:
/opt/firefox/ is a default choice of directory to install firefox into for system wide installations, if you chose another directory amend that part accordingly.

if you did a personal install, the directory should be something like /home/userid/*/firefox/ which you need to include into the Exec= option.

hope this helps

and I can run the firefox from any directory via a terminal. This is not an issue.

The issue is to be able to activate firefox with the firefox.terminal file being showed in my original post.

My main object is to learn and understand, so I will much appreciate an answer to my 2 questions in my original post.

Thank you for the answer so far.

Also - I hope I am in the correct sub-forum (which I am not sure I am)

is this about firefox.terminal or firefox.desktop???

1 - a .desktop file is like a windoze shortcut, so not really a script
2 - if this is a system wide install, you may have to change permissions. if this is a personal install, this should not be an issue.

if this is an issue in Debian, this is the correct sub-forum

if you want a quick way to create shortcuts, try drag and drop from the main menu to the desktop.

And I mean that the Linux machine is for one user only. hope you meant this.

About the file name, my mistake, sorry, the name is as in the original post "firefox.desktop".

Thank you for the clarification, now I know what is a *.desktop is.

But still when I am double clicking on it, I'm getting a nice small window saying "Do you want to run"Firefox.desktop", or display its contents?"
and asking me to select between:

1) Run in Terminal
2) Display
3) Cancel
4) Run

Non of the above works (only 'cancel' works of course)

The "firefox.desktop" file attributes are: 0775

Does anyone knows what do I miss here?

in what directory did you install firefox?

filepermissions are ok for launching the shortcut.
1 = execute, 2 = write, 4 = read, these are summed up.
so 775 means read, write and execute permissions for the owner and the group that the file is owned by and read and execute permissions for others.

have you tried to drag and drop the shortcut from the main menu to your desktop?
this might give you some insight in what info you are missing or is incorrect in your current shortcut.

The firefox is installed under /usr/bin/firefox/

The symlink done was:
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Do you mean to drag and drop any other SW application to learn from it, because the FF is not shown in the menus, which BTW I will be happy to solve as well.