Missing gui application icon when app launched in toolbox

[fywrite (F A)]

I’m on Fedora Linux Silverblue 41. I use toolbox to install emacs.
After running emacs in toolbox Gnome dock has no icon for it.
Is this default behaviour of running toolbox gui apps from terminal or am i missing something?

Summary

⬢ [fywrite@toolbx ~]$ ls /usr/share/applications/
emacs.desktop  emacs-mail.desktop  geoclue-demo-agent.desktop  mimeapps.list  xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.desktop
⬢ [fywrite@toolbx ~]$ less /usr/share/applications/emacs.desktop 

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Emacs
GenericName=Text Editor
Comment=Edit text
MimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++;
Exec=emacs-desktop %F
Icon=emacs
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Development;TextEditor;
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=Emacs
/usr/share/applications/emacs.desktop (END)

⬢ [fywrite@toolbx ~]$ ls /usr/share/emacs/29.4/etc/ | grep emacs.icon
emacs.icon

Summary for installation process via toolbox

fywrite@fedora:~$ toolbox create dev
Created container: dev
Enter with: toolbox enter dev
fywrite@fedora:~$ toolbox enter dev
⬢ [fywrite@toolbx ~]$ dnf history list
ID Command line                                                                                                                                Date and time       Action(s) Altered
 1 dnf5 --config /builddir/result/image/build/image-root/kiwi_dnf5.conf -y --disable-plugin=priorities,versionlock --installroot /builddir/res 2024-11-18 06:48:27               354
⬢ [fywrite@toolbx ~]$ sudo dnf install emacs
⬢ [fywrite@toolbx ~]$ emacs

Problem solved.

[boredsquirrel]

This is normal when running apps with no .desktop entry

Read into it, you can create one your own, that launches the program through toolbx.

Inside the toolbx:

cp /usr/share/applications/emacs.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
cp /usr/share/icons/somedirectory/emacs.svg ~/.local/share/icons/emacs.svg

If emacs has no desktop entry, you can create the entry manually. You can download an SVG icon from the internet if you dont find it.

cat > ~/.local/share/applications/emacs-toolbox.desktop <<EOF
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Emacs (Toolbox)
Exec=toolbox run -c BOXNAME emacs
Icon=$HOME/.local/share/icons/emacs.svg
Terminal=false
Categories=Development;Editor;
EOF

Or you can use distrobox and the distrobox-export --app feature, which makes this easy. Uses the same containers and technology, just a different manager.