I don’t know what should be listed in ‘open with’ in Dolphin because I don’t use KDE. In Nautilus (the file manager in the default Desktop Environment, GNOME), there shouldn’t be anything listed.
I wrote the comment about double clicking to run without actually trying it for Skype. For some reason it doesn’t work for me with the skype executable, which is curious. I does work with the firefox executable. I don’t have time to investigate that right now though.
If you’re truing to run an executable in the current working you need to prefix it’s name with ./ because for security reasons the current working directory is not in $PATH. Try
This turns out to be quite interesting. For a given value of interesting
Double clicking the skype executable in Nautlius results in the message “There is no application installed for shared library files”. This is apparently because Nautilus can tell the difference between shared libraries and executables and position independent executables are actually shared libraries that are executable, so Nautilus treats them like a shared library. I can’t locate any information on how Dolphin handles position independent executables.
mike@linux-7xyj:~/hardening-wrapper> for e in ~/Downloads/skype-4.3.0.37/skype /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox;do file $e;./hardening-check.sh $e;done
/home/mike/Downloads/skype-4.3.0.37/skype: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
/home/mike/Downloads/skype-4.3.0.37/skype:
Position Independent Executable: yes
Stack protected: yes
Fortify Source functions: yes
Read-only relocations: yes
Immediate binding: no, not found!
/usr/lib64/firefox/firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.4, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
/usr/lib64/firefox/firefox:
Position Independent Executable: no, normal executable!
Stack protected: yes
Fortify Source functions: yes
Read-only relocations: yes
Immediate binding: no, not found!
mike@linux-7xyj:~/hardening-wrapper>
In theory you could run skype by double clicking the skype.desktop file but that Exec line in that is, inevitably, just calling skype without a path specified so it’ll only work if skype is in your $PATH. You can make the skype.desktop file work, and make it so you can run skype just by typing skype by adding skype to your $PATH. The easiest way to do that is to create a symbolic link to the skype binary from your own bin directory, which is included in $PATH if it exists. E.g.
$ cd
$ mkdir bin
$ cd bin
$ ln -s ~/Downloads/skype-4.3.0.37/skype
$ rehash
$ skype
