Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon Manually Add Application to Cinnamon Menu and Panel

The Newshosting application installs itself to the desktop but not to the Cinnamon menu, so there is no “right-click > Add to Panel” option. Here’s a quick way to add an item to the Cinnamon menu.

First, you need a script to launch your application. Something like:

#!/bin/bash
/home/myusername/myawesomeapp --param1 --param2

You’ll want to save this script and make it executable…
sudo chmod +x /home/myusername/myawesomescript.sh

Newshosting’s desktop icon links to a shell script that launches the application, so I’m going to just link to that script from here on out. Just replace the Newshosting details below and you’ll be fine.

Using your preferred editor, create a <desired_name>.desktop file in the /usr/share/applications path and paste in the following (edit where necessary!)

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=2.9.9
Name=Newshosting
GenericName=Newshosting Launcher
Type=Application
Exec=/bin/sh -c "/home/scking/newshosting-2.9.9/newshosting.sh"
Icon=/home/scking/newshosting-2.9.9/64x64_newshosting.png

When complete, save this file and using chmod, give it 644 permissions:
sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/applications/newshosting.desktop

Now, go to your Cinnamon Menu and your menu item should be there. Just right-click and “Add to Panel” as you usually would.