You were spot on. I forgott the ' at the end. Now it does open the pic from xterm. But the problem of the actual .desktop shortcut still exist. It does not show up in the list of desktop shortcuts or widgets. (even tried rebooting) My file is named img.desktop (no other extension like .txt) It is placed at: usr/share/applications/hildon This is its content: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=0.13 Type=Application Name=Image Exec=openfile '/home/user/MyDocs/.images/Sketch/Face.jpg' Icon=general_image