COPASI is released on Linux as a zipped tarball, to make it as easy as possible to get started with it. You simply extract it and run the executables. However, sometimes that is not enough, or if you don't like to launch your programs from the command line, then you want an alternative. Even worse some distributions launch the CopasiUI shell script in an editor, rather than the application instead.
So enough! Here you will find a shell script that you invoke once, and once done it generates a COPASI.desktop file that your Distribution ought to pick up and launch for you.
so you simply download this shell script:
(choose right click and save, should your browser not download the file) make it executable:
chmod +x create-copasi-icon.sh
and run it with the location where you placed your COPASI installation (and where you will leave it). Say you downloaded COPASI-4.16.104-Linux-64bit and placed it in your home directory, where you want it to stay, then you'd run:
./create-copasi-icon.sh ~/COPASI-4.16.104-Linux-64bit
The script will print the full path of the file it generated, and so if you don't like the results you could simply delete it right away. No other files on your systems will be touched.
Once the script ran, you can go to your application launcher of choice (or simply launch your super key aka windows key) and type COPASI. You should find the COPASI icon right there waiting for you. Let me know (with the name of your linux distro & version) if it does not.
Uninstalling the icon
If at any other point you would like to remove the file you can simply remove the desktop file via:
rm ~/.local/share/applications/COPASI.desktop
