What's the correct way to maintain the Gnome menu

[Biker]

I've searched and skimmed a few threads concerning the Gnome menus. I have read a lot of discussions but no real and final answers. (I may have missed the point. (?))

I have installed a number of Gnome applications that 'register' themselves in the Gnome menu. Great. They also show up for all users of this system. Excellent.

Now, I have a set of applications that do not automatically configure themself in the Gnome menu. Either because the package isn't a Gnome application or because it isn't built to do so anyway.

I can, as root, add any X application to my Gnome menu, but this will not show up in the Gnome menu for ordinary users.

I have tried, as root, to add applications in Nautilus (Applications), but even if I get no error messages, they don't remain in Nautilus after save. I have read about other Gentoo'ists having this problem but I haven't found any solution.

What is the preferred way for root to maintain a common Gnome menu?


BTW, I'm using Gnome 2.4 and kernel 2.6(10).

Biker

[catzooka]

adding/removing items from the GNOME menu as user works perfectly for me. all i have to do is go into the menu (say 'Multimedia') then right click in there, select 'Entire Menu' and choose any of the actions in there to add/remove items to/from the menu. so in other words it works for me...

now to your problem... a possible cause of this may be that if you are someone who updated from 2.2 to 2.4 and you did not delete the ~/.gnome2 stuff in your home (user) directory, it may be possible to fix your problem by deleting ~/.gnome2 in your home directory and setting everything up from new. maybe then you'd be able to do what i described above. i don't know if this will work, but i do remember having the same issue in GNOME 2.2 and it disappeared after i updated to GNOME 2.4 and deleting ~/.gnome2...

in any case. i wish you good luck. hopefully this will help you out a little

[Biker]

[karl11]

All gnome entries (and soon linux applications (thanks to kde for adopting the standard too)) are stored as .desktop files in:

/usr/share/applications

Those are systemwide files and all you should have to do is copy a desktop file over and edit it yourself. They are very straightforward files. For the changes to appear in your panel you need to either run fam or do a killall -HUP gnome-panel

Karl

[Biker]

[tomk]

The reason you get strange characters, which look like binary in a text editor, in these files is that they often include comments in various different languages. The strange characters would look correct if you were using the correct language encoding. But you shouldn't need to bother with comment lines for other languages so you can remove any lines which start with this: Comment[two_letter_language_code]= all you need is the Comment= line in the file. You're favourite text editor should do the trick.

HTH
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[ecatmur]

The easiest way to make or edit a .desktop file is to drag it onto a Gnome panel (or create it with right click->Add to panel->Launcher...) and then right click on it and select Properties.

This lets you set name, comment, command, icon, etc., and see what it'll look like on a panel. You can then drag it back into Nautilus or onto the desktop (copying it) and delete it from the panel.

It's still a good idea to check it in a text editor. gedit is perfectly adequate, especially as it will correctly detect the encoding of a file containing localised names and comments. If you want to use a different text editor, you may need to set LC_ALL to a UTF8 locale.

[Biker]