I don't know what exactly you're trying to do. The nice thing about Unix and derivatives (Linux) is that (almost) everything is represented as a "file", even though some things are not files in the common sense of the word. A unix socket is an example of that. It looks like a file you can open, read and write to, but it is not a file. So touch'ing it makes no sense. touch will create a (real) file of zero size. Presumably you'd need to run the program that actually creates those sockets and listens (binds) on them. I don't know what applauncher does, nor do I care. I suspect it's one of those over-complicated "abstraction layers" that supposedly bring nice effects (splash screen? single instance? what has happend to Linux?!) where actually they only make everything more complicated to understand as well as contributing to the dependency hell we're living in. If you really want to port applauncher to Fremantle I'd recommend that you debug your program using the perror() function. Really, it's the best thing you can do at the moment to diagnose the situation. If Harmattan programs actually *require* this contraption, I would recommend you make a dummy/fake applauncherd so that programs can be run like normal programs. Then the user would be able to install the real "thing" or the fake one (hint: "provides", "conflicts", since we're playing the debian game). Good luck anyway!