[gentoo-user] Kde menu

[gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Leonardo]

Hi list,

I'm using gentoo since some months now, and I have to say that I
really start to like it, especially the possibility of
customizing and deciding how to 'create' your system.

On the 'not so happy' side I think I have found only minor
things; the biggest point is I don't have a 'consistent' kde
menu:

some applications with GUI are missing from the menu, some are
present twice; the categorization itself is somehow
dis-organized, with some entries showing an 'other' child menu,
listing applications that could fit also in the parent menu
(things like kde->graphic->other).


Is there a way to reorganize the menu automatically, without
having to go through all the installed packages per hand?
I looked on the net, ant in the wikis, but cannot find
reasonable documentation.
That would be relly nice, because althought I know the stuff I
installed, other people accessing the PC may be happy to use it,
well you know, as it were that other dumb OS where you can use
programs without dealing with that scary 'black window for the
commands'.


Thanks list,
Leodp

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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Philip Webb]

060721 Leonardo wrote:
> I'm using gentoo since some months now
> and I have to say that I really start to like it ... ,

Did it take you that long (grin) ?

> esp the possibility of customizing your system.

Yes, that's what Gentoo is largely about & living at the cutting edge.

> On the 'not so happy' side, the biggest point is
> I don't have a 'consistent' kde menu:
> Is there a way to reorganize the menu automatically
> without having to go through all the installed packages per hand?

KDE tries to organise the items in a rational manner,
but it also provides Kmenuedit to allow you to do whatever you want.
After you've designed your menu as you like it best,
you simply have to check that new apps get put where you prefer.

BTW there's a cute little app Apwal (x11-misc), which you can customise
to call up a temporary array of icons on your desktop representing apps.
I have it assigned to L-click & use it for apps I commonly use,
but don't have restarted by KDE when it starts up.
Apwal deserves to be better known.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Leonardo]

--- Philip Webb <purslow@sympatico.ca> wrote:

> 060721 Leonardo wrote:
> > I'm using gentoo since some months now
> > and I have to say that I really start to like it ... ,
> 
> Did it take you that long (grin) ?

Haha.
I think installing Gentoo takes forever. When it looks ok, I
start thinking how to do things differently, and the emerge goes
on, and on...


> > I don't have a 'consistent' kde menu:
> > Is there a way to reorganize the menu automatically
> > without having to go through all the installed packages per
> hand?
> 
> KDE tries to organise the items in a rational manner,
> but it also provides Kmenuedit to allow you to do whatever you
> want.
> After you've designed your menu as you like it best,
> you simply have to check that new apps get put where you
> prefer.
> 
> BTW there's a cute little app Apwal (x11-misc), which you can
> customise
> to call up a temporary array of icons on your desktop
> representing apps.
> I have it assigned to L-click & use it for apps I commonly
> use,
> but don't have restarted by KDE when it starts up.
> Apwal deserves to be better known.
> 

Nice tool Apwal.
I knew Kmenuedit already, but I have way too many apps to loose
time reorganizing the menu going after them one by one.
'Till some months ago at home, and at work I was/am using
Mandriva; when I urpmi a package there, it goes automatically in
the kde menu.
Isn't there a similar way of doing it in Gentoo,
maybe an app that goes through the 'world' and reconstructs with
some decent categorization the menus (kde, gnome...)?

Ciao, Leodp


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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Philip Webb]

060721 Leonardo wrote:
> 'Till some months ago at home, and at work I was/am using Mandriva;
> when I urpmi a package there, it goes automatically in the kde menu.
> Isn't there a similar way of doing it in Gentoo,

That's what should happen with a KDE app on Gentoo.
It should be a function of KDE, not the distro.
Sometimes, KDE puts apps in unexpected places:
perhaps you were just lucky with the apps you installed with Mandriva.
Before Gentoo (2000-3), I used Mandriva & didn't notice any difference.
Another possibility is that you're now using a newer version of KDE,
which may do things differently, though again I haven't noticed it.

You don't have to put everything in the KDE menu:
you can use the miniterminal ( Alt-F2 ), which has a history list.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Benno Schulenberg]

Leonardo wrote:
> I knew Kmenuedit already, but I have way too many apps to loose
> time reorganizing the menu going after them one by one.

So many apps!?  But you do this only once, you never reinstall KDE 
or Gentoo, the customized menus stay with you forever.

But good apps _do_ add themselves to the menus, if they contain 
a .desktop file that goes into /usr/share/applications/ .  If your 
favourite apps don't do this, report a bug to them, upstream.

Benno

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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Alexander Skwar]

Benno Schulenberg schrieb:

> But good apps _do_ add themselves to the menus, if they contain 
> a .desktop file that goes into /usr/share/applications/ .  If your 
> favourite apps don't do this, report a bug to them, upstream.

IMO that's one of the weakpoints of Gentoo. Other distributions,
like the Debian crowd (Ubuntu) or Mandrivia, make it so, that each
and every "important" application is added to the menu. In Ubuntu
it is so, that in Gnome (and I suppose in KDE as well) there's a
"Debian" menu which holds all the applications.

Something like this should be done as well in Gentoo.

Alexander Skwar
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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Gian Domeni Calgeer]

Am Freitag, 21. Juli 2006 22:57 schrieb Benno Schulenberg:
> But good apps _do_ add themselves to the menus, if they contain
> a .desktop file that goes into /usr/share/applications/ .  If your
> favourite apps don't do this, report a bug to them, upstream.

Is this also true for games? I know quite a few games which haven't got their 
own .desktop files, like torcs, ace of penguins and gl-117.

Gian
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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:17:55 +0200, Gian Domeni Calgeer wrote:

> Is this also true for games? I know quite a few games which haven't got
> their own .desktop files, like torcs, ace of penguins and gl-117.

File bugs for them.


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Neil Bothwick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Roy Wright]

Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> But good apps _do_ add themselves to the menus, if they contain 
> a .desktop file that goes into /usr/share/applications/ .  If your 
> favourite apps don't do this, report a bug to them, upstream.
>   

What I'd really love would be for the ebuild to elog which menu folder 
the application
is installed to!

My standard procedure is:

1. emerge newApp
2. look in the folder(s) I'd expect it to be in
3. look in Lost & Found
4. look in all folders
5. run Menu Updating Tool
6. manually create the menu entry

BTW, anyone know how KDE stores the menu items?  It might be faster to 
search
there with find/grep...

Have fun,
Roy
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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Richard Fish]

On 7/21/06, Leonardo <leodp@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On the 'not so happy' side I think I have found only minor
> things; the biggest point is I don't have a 'consistent' kde
> menu:

I think you will find that Gentoo follows the $upstream releases much
more closely than other distributions...

> some applications with GUI are missing from the menu

...so if some GUI application doesn't have a .desktop file provided by
$upstream, Gentoo probably will not have it.

However it is perfectly reasonable to file bugs in bugs.gentoo.org
about this, and request a .desktop file be added.  It is even better
if you can make a .desktop file yourself, and attach it to the bug
report.

> some are present twice

Did you preserve your ~/.kde directories from another system?  If so,
you may have .desktop files there that account for the duplicate
entries.

> the categorization itself is somehow dis-organized, with some entries showing an
> 'other' child menu, listing applications that could fit also in the parent menu
> (things like kde->graphic->other).

Not sure what you mean by "other".  I have "More Applications"
sub-menus, but no "Other" menus.  But assuming this is what you mean,
this is controlled by the X-KDE-More category in the .desktop file.
Again, this is a case of Gentoo following $upstream more closely.

If you really don't like this, you can:

find /usr/kde/3.5/share/applications -name "*.desktop" -exec \
    sed -i -e "s/X-KDE-More;//g" {} \;

But bewarned, gentoo will then refuse to remove the .desktop files
when you go to a new KDE version, since their mtime and md5sum will no
longer match what gentoo thinks they should be.  So you may have to do
a bit of manual cleanup from time-to-time.  Or you can use quickpkg to
make binary tarballs of the KDE packages, and then re-install from
those, which will fix the mtime/md5 sums in the package database to
match what you changed.

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] Kde menu

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:00:18 -0700, Richard Fish wrote:

>  Or you can use quickpkg to
> make binary tarballs of the KDE packages, and then re-install from
> those, which will fix the mtime/md5 sums in the package database to
> match what you changed.

According to the manpage for qcheck, part of portage-utils, you should be
able to do this with "qcheck --update packagename", although I've not
tried it.


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