Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi downloaded and installed Mathematica but I can't see any desktop icon or menu item to Mathematica

There is a menu item called Wolfram but that doesn't do a lot (Just terminal with In[]= showing)

Running mathematica from LXTerminal works though

regards

Simon

These instructions for creating desktop shortcuts and menu entries in LXDE should help:

http://lkubaski.wordpress.com/2012/06/2 ... shortcuts/

I had the same issue. You can launch Mathematica as below
-> Open a terminal window
-> Run "/user/bin/Mathematica"

Now Mathematica will be opened!

Hi,
It appears that once you have run Mathmatica from the command line as above, a short cut will appear in the app launcher under the 'Education' menu item. I now have one and I didn't put it there.

shijor wrote:I had the same issue. You can launch Mathematica as below
-> Open a terminal window
-> Run "/user/bin/Mathematica"

Now Mathematica will be opened!

the correct path is "/usr/bin/mathematica".

sharix wrote:

shijor wrote:I had the same issue. You can launch Mathematica as below
-> Open a terminal window
-> Run "/user/bin/Mathematica"

Now Mathematica will be opened!

the correct path is "/usr/bin/mathematica".

Thanks for the correction.

I struggled with this for a while. It looks like I needn't have.

I rarely login with the default "pi" user. The first thing I do on booting a new image is to create a new user and add it to the sudoers list. Then I change the user pi's password.

Having tried to make sense of the pages I found on creating lxde menu entries, I logged in as the user pi to see if the menu items had been created under the default user account during installation.

Sure enough, they had; icons for both Wolfram and Mathematica. Curious to work out where the differences lay, I logged-out and back in again using my normal user account.

On checking the menus on my non-pi account, I found both icons were now present.

I've installed few optional applications. "Midnight Commander" being one of a few file-management utilities I find indispensable. MC created its own menu-item on installation but I only noticed this recently.

I'm hoping all it takes is a login as pi to update the menu structures.

Perhaps those who aren't seeing the icons are running with the default pi account?

This worked for me but your mileage may vary. I certainly didn't add or change anything else to make them suddenly appear.

I have the same question. I would like a nice little Mathematica icon on the desktop with which to launch the application. The icon should be their little spikey guy:



All I can find is a Wolfram icon (which is just the Mathematica kernel, not the notebook interface) duplicated in Education and in Programming. I can find no clickable Mathematica.

I temporarily solved the problem by launching "mathematica &" from a terminal window (you don't need the "/usr/bin" since that's already in your path), and then saved a Mathematica notebook on the desktop. So I can launch Mathematica by double-clicking the notebook. Of course, then I get that notebook.

Ok, got it. Thanks to a comment on the download page.

Edit this text file (with sudo so you can save it): /usr/share/applications/wolfram-mathematica.desktop

Add a line at the end:

StartupNotify=true

The Mathematica icon to open the notebook interface will then appear in the Education menu (along with Wolfram, which is the command line kernel interface).

Then you can right-click the Mathematica in Education and then click on Add to Desktop.

I also added Wolfram to my desktop.

It's not clear to me why the lack of StartupNotify would lead to a menu icon not being populated. There are no hacks in the package installation that specify pi's home directory, either, so behavior should be the same for all users. I can check whether or not we're adhering the Startup Notification XDG spec. If LXDE expects that value to be there, that is reason enough to add something.

alexatwri wrote:menu icon not being populated.

I had the same problem. Completely fresh & latest Raspbian on a 512 MB model B with 8 GB card, system apt-get updated and rpi-updated before installing Mathematica. Possible non-standard settings: auto-login user pi to desktop, CET timezone, en-gb wireless keyboard+mouse, nl-nl locale, custom hostname, custom password.

I'll add that line to the official debian package. So, this should be changed in the next update. Thanks for the feedback!

I worked with trying to place an icon for weeks. Then I read an article about the "/usr/share/application" directory. There is a list of desktop files. The article I read suggested making a soft link to these entries. I did that and had good results but also COPYing one of the files in the /usr/share/applications directory to the /home/pi/Directory did just as good. If you want to make a new desktop entry, place a copy of the file for desktop shortcuts in both directories.
If you prefer to use a soft link try this

cd /home/pi/Desktop
ln -s program name

program name is the desktop entry in the /usr/share/applications directory (as /usr/share/applications/idle.desktop)

I am not the best a writing but I hope this has been some help.
Ed