uriel1998
November 21st, 2010, 10:32 PM
I just switched my WM to Openbox, so this suddenly became a LOT more relevant to me. However, the discrepancies between the open desktop standard and the "Debian/Gnome/Ubuntu" start menu can cause a lot of problems and confusion (as seen in this thread) (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1621989). I recently switched to Ubuntu from blackbox for windows, so I'm both a noob and an oldbie. ::shrug::
So I'm going to put the information that I've had to figure out the hard way in one place. I've probably mucked up the terminology, and may even have a major error somewhere, so additional comments are appreciated.
Your Launchers/Shortcuts are hiding information from you.
I'm not actually going to look at the start menu so much as the icons and applications that show up in it. Sometimes apps will show up in Gnome-Do and Launchy (or a dock) that are nowhere to be found in the start menu. Launchy put me on the right path to find the files. They exist in (some or all of):
/usr/share/applications/
/usr/local/share/applications/
/usr/share/gdm/applications/
/usr/share/applications/kde/
~/.local/share/applications
These application launchers/shortcuts ( *.desktop files ) have a bunch of attributes, only some of which are available from the GUI. Normally you see: Name, Description, Command, Comment, and you can change the permissions, emblems, and icon. Too bad that what you see in the GUI (Nautilus, for example) is not always the real file name.
I used TuxCommander (http://tuxcmd.sourceforge.net/) to actually get to the filenames themselves; you can also use the Open dialog in Gedit to see the real filenames. Because I'm an anal retentive kind of guy, I went through and renamed the files appropriately. Then I opened the suckers up in a text editor. These are the key values that you need to worry about (there's more values, but this is a "getting you running", not a reference manual.
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=DirSyncPro
Comment=DirSyncPro
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Faenza/apps/scalable/zen-icon.svg
Exec=bash /home/usr/scripts/dirsyncpro.sh
Categories=System;Utility;
Most of these are pretty straightforward. There are two reasons why some of these don't show up in the main menu.
Some launchers have the value Hidden=true. Obviously, that hides it. Delete that line.
The other thing is the lack of the Categories value. You can find a full list of the values here (file:///home/steven/Downloads/desktop_categories.html). It's a bit tedious, but suddenly everything shows up where you expect it. (And pipe menus for configuring *box menus work a lot better too.)
There are a lot more values to poke around with, but this should answer the typical noob question of "where are my shortcuts"? Lord knows I had that question...
So I'm going to put the information that I've had to figure out the hard way in one place. I've probably mucked up the terminology, and may even have a major error somewhere, so additional comments are appreciated.
Your Launchers/Shortcuts are hiding information from you.
I'm not actually going to look at the start menu so much as the icons and applications that show up in it. Sometimes apps will show up in Gnome-Do and Launchy (or a dock) that are nowhere to be found in the start menu. Launchy put me on the right path to find the files. They exist in (some or all of):
/usr/share/applications/
/usr/local/share/applications/
/usr/share/gdm/applications/
/usr/share/applications/kde/
~/.local/share/applications
These application launchers/shortcuts ( *.desktop files ) have a bunch of attributes, only some of which are available from the GUI. Normally you see: Name, Description, Command, Comment, and you can change the permissions, emblems, and icon. Too bad that what you see in the GUI (Nautilus, for example) is not always the real file name.
I used TuxCommander (http://tuxcmd.sourceforge.net/) to actually get to the filenames themselves; you can also use the Open dialog in Gedit to see the real filenames. Because I'm an anal retentive kind of guy, I went through and renamed the files appropriately. Then I opened the suckers up in a text editor. These are the key values that you need to worry about (there's more values, but this is a "getting you running", not a reference manual.
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=DirSyncPro
Comment=DirSyncPro
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Faenza/apps/scalable/zen-icon.svg
Exec=bash /home/usr/scripts/dirsyncpro.sh
Categories=System;Utility;
Most of these are pretty straightforward. There are two reasons why some of these don't show up in the main menu.
Some launchers have the value Hidden=true. Obviously, that hides it. Delete that line.
The other thing is the lack of the Categories value. You can find a full list of the values here (file:///home/steven/Downloads/desktop_categories.html). It's a bit tedious, but suddenly everything shows up where you expect it. (And pipe menus for configuring *box menus work a lot better too.)
There are a lot more values to poke around with, but this should answer the typical noob question of "where are my shortcuts"? Lord knows I had that question...