Editing menus

[Eamonn Sullivan]

Hi all, from the silence in response to this, I gather editing menus
is just plain broken in Ubuntu? I've spent days searching google on
this topic and the conversations just go in circles between those who
have RTFM but haven't tried it ('just browse to
applications-all-users:/// in nautilus...') and those who have (it
doesn't work). There are rumours of a fix in 2.10, so maybe it's all
working in Hoary? (I'm using Warty.)

All I want is tuxracer and bzflag to show up in the games menu for
every user. Ever try to tell an eight year old to just `type tuxracer
at a shell prompt'? What's a shell? How do you spell 'tux'? Where's
the 't' key? etc.

Since menus apparently *can* be modified by a small fraction of
packages we install (maybe just in main?), is there a way I can do
this in code? A snippet of C or python would be very much appreciated.
Also, how do I even keep changes I make myself? I'm getting tired of
changing 'gksu' to 'gksudo' in the Firestarter launcher every time I
want to change some options.

-Eamonn


On Sat, 1 Jan 2005 11:24:14 +0000, Eamonn Sullivan
<eamonn.sullivan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I love gnome, but one frustration with it is the difficulty of editing
> menus for all users on the system. I have five children and a spouse
> using this computer and I've been trying with out much success to add
> items to the menus that are visible by all and survive a reboot.
> Editing my own is fairly easy, but I've only succeeded once in getting
> a new item added to a menu for everyone. I followed the directions in
> the help system:
> 
> 1. sudo nautilus applications-all-users:///
> 2. create new launchers where I want them
> 
> And then, nothing. The applications just don't show up on users'
> menus. I've studied how the built-in ones work and copied them
> exactly, putting the *.desktop files in /usr/share/applications etc.
> and still nothing.
> 
> The one time this worked was when I compiled Inkscape 0.4 from source
> and I followed the exact same procedure. If I open
> applications-all-users:///, there's the Inkscape launcher, right next
> to another one I tried to add. One is visible, one isn't. The
> locations/permissions/owner of the two launchers and .desktop files
> are *exactly* the same.
> 
> Out of desperation recently, I created menu items for myself and then
> copied the changes in ~/.gnome manually to other users. That worked,
> but only until the next reboot, whereupon the changes disappeared for
> everyone except me.
> 
> Has anyone else succeeded? If so, how?
>