This simple tutorial will show you how to add application shortcut to Desktop in Ubuntu 12.04.In earlier versions of Ubuntu it’s not that easy,but in 12.04 you can just Drag the application’s Icon to your desktop then chmod the permission of the shortcut.here we go

1.Go to Dash and find the application you want to create shortcut on Desktop,then DRAG the icon to your desktop

2.Open a terminal by pressing CTL+ALT+t ,then run below command

sudo chmod +x ~/Desktop/*.desktop

Without this step you may get error like “Untrusted application launcher”

3.You are done.Enjoy!

To do it via commands:

ln -s /usr/share/applications/your-app-name ~/Desktop

sudo chmod +x ~/Desktop/*.desktop

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Method 2:

Create Desktop Entry manually,
Simple

Take eclipse as an example, the simplest Desktop Entry:

[Desktop Entry]  
    Exec=/opt/eclipse/eclipse  
    Type=Application

General content:

[Desktop Entry]  
    Version=1.0  
    Encoding=UTF-8  
    Name=Eclipse  
    Comment=Eclipse IDE  
    Exec=eclipse  
    Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm  
    Terminal=false  
    Type=Application  
    Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;  
    StartupNotify=true