rdesktop window gets a -?- icon in natty launcher

screenshot - icon has a red square around it

This might be related to 771172. I moved my rdesktop.desktop file from ~/.local/share/applications to /usr/share/applications and now the correct icon is showing in the launcher.

I confirm that moving .desktop file to /usr/share/applications resolved the problem, also with a custom rdesktop launcher with parameters.

I have had this issue as well from the time unity came out and have found nothing specifically say how to work around the issue, just "you need a custom .desktop file located in ~/.local/share/applications/ or /usr/share/applications".

A bit of research on .desktop files and a bit of comparing existing .desktop files I found that adding the lines...

StartupNotify=false
StartupWMClass=rdesktop

It appears as if the StartupNotify flags are not sent in the rdesktop program so Unity can not properly handle icon assignment and mapping the running program to the Unity launcher. Using StartupWMClass=rdesktop in the .desktop launcher tells unity to expect a window with the given string as its WM class or WM name hint this allows Unity to handle the as expected.

I have my custom launcher located in ~/.local/share/applications/ for simplicity and it works fine when dragged to unity.

I also had the same issue with VirtualBox as well but the same work around allowed it to work as expected.

For those that want more information you can look here
http://standards.freedesktop.org/startup-notification-spec/startup-notification-0.1.txt

Well, this is fixed in Precise...