[Techtalk] Ubuntu menu falling apart

[Miriam English]

Hi Anne,

I don't use Gnome on my slow old machines so I don't know how its menus 
work. I know they did fall apart after I'd been fiddling with them when 
I used to use Mandrake (just before the name change to Mandriva).

It occurred to me that if you backup the .gnome file(s) in your account 
to a safe directory, then copy the .gnome file(s) from the guest account 
into yours perhaps you might regain the basic items. Then you could look 
through the backups and the new ones from Guest and add back whatever 
extras you want.

In Puppy Linux the menus under jwm (Joe's Window Manager) probably have 
a number of similarities. Here is how it works under jwm. The basic 
underlying mechanism is probably quite similar to Gnome.

When /usr/sbin/fixmenus is run, the ~/.jwmrc file is rebuilt. (The 
.jwmrc file is a description of the menu in xml.)

fixmenus gets the info needed using
	/etc/xdg/templates/_root_.jwmrc
as a template and scanning
	/etc/xdg/menus/jwm.menu
which lists the main menu entries between <name></name> tags.
Each menu item also has a corresponding "*.directory" entry between 
<Directory></Directory> tags.

They're inserted in the main menu by reading them from
	/usr/share/desktop-directories/
In jwm they seem to serve mostly to give the icon for the submenu item, 
but may have further uses in a Gnome environment.

The items in the submenus are sorted from the *.desktop files in
	/usr/share/applications/
These do the real work. They give the name of the item, its icon, a 
comment (currently unused in jwm), the program to be executed, whether 
it runs in a terminal or not, and the category.

This last, the category, is how the item is grouped onto which submenu. 
How the categories relate is listed by
	/etc/xdg/menus/hierarchy

I know it is insanely convoluted with stuff scattered inexplicably 
around the filing system, but I think most of those complexities were 
inherited from Gnome, so a lot is probably applicable to your machine. 
The best thing about it is that, once set up, it does let you add new 
menu items really easily simply by dropping new *.desktop files into the 
/usr/share/applications/ folder.

Good luck,

	- Miriam

Anne Wainwright wrote:
> Hello, Amy,
> 
> That was my first thought but with half the menu entries also having
> gone awol I wondered about how to get that back first. Any ideas? Is
> the deletion of files in ~/.gnome going to do this (Little Girl)? Note
> that the Main Menu entry has disappeared from the menu.
> 
> I haven't had time to examine this closely since it the machine is on
> accounting duties all day. Tomorrow I'll 'smartcntl' it before it gets
> used.
> 
> Anne
> 
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:36:23 -0400
> Amy Hussey <rpgirl1981 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I guess I'd try recreating my top panel.
>>
>> Delete the panel and then add everything back to it.
>>
>> Amy
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Anne Wainwright
>> <anotheranne at fables.co.za>wrote:
>>
>>> Hi, all,
>>>
>>> Woke up the office accounting box the other morning to a severely
>>> depleted row of icons on the top panel and a ditto menu system. Even
>>> the System / Preferences with the 'Main Menu' option has gone awol.
>>>
>>> What is the basic route to repair this? Where should I start to
>>> look?
>>>
>>> Oddly if I open a Guest Session, everything is there.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> Anne
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
Blog: http://miriam_e.livejournal.com