well If you just want a quick solution , you can have the icon actually run the application in terminal.. ex. for paper toss edit /usr/share/applications/hildon/papertoss.desktop change the line that starts with Exec=python /opt/papertoss/game.py to Exec=osso-xterm python \ /opt/papertoss/game.py note that after writing python leave a space then \ then space then /opt/papertoss/game.py the same can be applied to other applications , just find the .desktop file for that application in /usr/share/applications/hildon/ and edit it