Ok, I think I’m hosed now. I’ve spent the last few days trying to sort out my Applications Menu. Talk about NON intuitive! I use the Application Browser to search for duplicates. I use a terminal window to run commands to determine if programs have been deprecated (or un-installed). I Have Yast2 open to uninstall stuff that doesn’t work / that I don’t want. I discovered Alacarte, which means I didn’t have to browse through the shortcuts in MC in SU mode, then use a text editor to edit them.
All was happy until I noticed something. I’ll use the example ‘Printers’, which I used to test my theory. I started cussing after I proved my theory and deleted it. If I copy a ‘shortcut’ for ‘Printers’ to System/Hardware, then delete the original shortcut, the new copy disappears as well! Is it making a link, instead of copying it, then deleting the link as well??
I have no idea HOW many dozens of things I copied this way before I noticed this. I had worked my way down to the System menu, put it that way. I thought that Alacarte didn’t have the capability to MOVE shortcuts, so after copying them, I would delete the old ones where I didn’t want them.
Is there any way to recover them? Is there any way to re-download them from a repository or something? I’m seriously screwed here, around a third of my Applications Menu is missing!
ANY help is appreciated, thanks in advance.
Oh yeah, 10.2, Gnome, uhm… x86? Any other pertinent info needed?
As for the original menu, it sits in
etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu and
etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu.gnome
The ‘shortcuts’ themselves sit in /usr/share/applications
Technically, your menu starts in
~username/.config/menus/applications.menu
then ‘inserts’ the original applications.menu (and etc.) THEN inserts all of your custom changes. I have files in my ~username/.config/menus/applications.menu directory named
applications.menu.undo-10 through
applications.menu.undo-329
Consecutively.
I could almost cry. It’s like a 400 page long php webpage include chain. So the good news is I’m not screwed, the bad news is It’ll take me just as long to fix this as it would to erase everything and start over.
So, the next question is, does anyone know of a utility for editing the menus that is about 3 notches up the ladder from Alacarte? Surely there must be SOMETHING out there which works without making you pull your hair out.
Barring that, how about a program for loading 400-ish text files, possibly merging them, then sorting and folding the code?
Is this what they call out of the frying pan and into the fire? Once again, thanks for any help.
My experience with Alacarte (I think it’s part of GNOME now) is that it is darn near inflexible when it comes to shortcuts installed from packages. You can’t move them and you can’t delete them. The only ones you can change are the ones you’ve created yourself.
Yeah I just learned the hard way that it SUCKS. Anyway thanks for the input.
I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that the gnome-menus-editor that comes with 10.3 is superior to the old crappy gnome one and Alacarte. The stupid thing just flat isn’t available for 10.2. Anyway, I’m going to make the jump to 10.3 and hope for the best. I’m thinking that working backwards and fixing the broken stuff should be slightly faster than re-doing everything. I hope.
I’m AMAZED at the lack of a quality menu configuration tool. M$ have them all locked up in evil patents or something? j/k
I’m moving forward on crossed fingers here, so any more help would still be appreciated. I didn’t have much luck looking for an xml-ish mass editing tool either.
Perhaps. ****. I like the flexibility and customization features of Gnome. Who designed this retarded menu system anyway? They should be chained to a desk until they come up with a proper utility to change the layout.
I haven’t programmed in eons, but it looks like I may need to pick up the hammer and build my own tool to fix this.