[Techtalk] Ubuntu menu falling apart

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Anne Wainwright
<anotheranne at fables.co.za> 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.

First of, from the spec[1], here are the locations where entries for
apps are found:
/usr/share/applications (.desktop files, they're probably there)
/usr/local/share/applications
/usr/share/gnome/applications
And user-specific:
~/.local/share/applications/

More interestingly, the menu layout itself is stored in:
/etc/xdg/menus/... (applications.menu file most likely)
/etc/xdg/xdg-gnome/menus/... (legacy, probably does not exist)
And user-specific (if it exists):
~/.config/menus/...

If you remove that last directory in your home dir, that should reset
the menu. It's interesting to take a look inside and see why it's
seemingly corrupted though. If it's not, it might be a cache file in
~/.local/share/applications.  (I'm guessing, since the menus work for
other (e.g. a guest) users)

In any case, if it is corrupted and tests (run smartctl and do a disk
check too if you can) show your file system to be fine, it might be
caused by a bug in some package somewhere. I'm sure the ubuntu devs
would be interested in a bug report (though shepherding bug reports
through launchpad is like herding cats, IME).

HTH,
Wim

[1]:http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/ar01s02.html