Fedora Users — Re: edit the gnome menu?

Daniel Krippner wrote:

Hi List!

I've been searching for this the second time now, without result, therefore
I ask here: where can I edit the contents of the gnome menu? I've been
looking for vfolder-info files, but found only one, and that did not contain
what I wanted to edit. Also, I did not find anything useful in google
pertaining to FC2.
Thanks very much,
    Daniel

I had the same problem and the same difficulty finding an answer, eventually I found a way of making it work. I apologise for a long posting....

This describes how I added a submenu (subdirectory?) to the main Gnome menu. The aim was to have a submenu titled "Remote Logins" on the main menu, this submenu contained other submenus which in turn contained menu items which start up remote X terminal sessions on different machines.

In ascii art:-

Remote Logins +------ Thor +-------- www
              |            |
              |            +-------- User A
              |            |
              |            +-------- User B
	      |
	      +------ Odin +-------- www
                           |
                           +-------- User A

etc..etc..

I tried Google, www.gnome.org, the Fedora site and found lots of hints
but nothing that actually worked. Editing applications:/// didn't work,
this seems to be something to do with the way Fedora is configured, the
vfolder stuff didn't seem to work either. In the end I resorted to hand
editing some configuration files and the result worked.  That's all I
claim for this method, it worked for me (with FC2), I don't know if its
the "right" way or if it will work forever.

---------------------------------------------------------
First create a .directory file in /usr/share/desktop-directories which
describes each submenu you want to add, one file for each menu.

/usr/share/desktop-directories/Remote.directory

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Remote Logins
Comment=Remote Logins
Icon=
Type=Directory

and

/usr/share/desktop-directories/Remote-Thor.directory

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Thor
Comment=Thor
Icon=
Type=Directory

---------------------------------------------------------

Next create a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications which describes
the application (in this example the command to start the remote Xterm
session). I actually found I could put all my local .desktop files in a
subdirectory of /usr/share/applications which (to me) seems tidier.

/usr/share/applications/bhl/Thor_www.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=www
Name[en_US.ISO8859-1]=www
Exec=/usr/local/bin/remote thor www
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-term.png
Terminal=false
MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Categories=Remote;Thor;

The "Categories" section is what splits entries into menus and
seem to be arbitrary text strings which are referred to by other
files
---------------------------------------------------------

At this point the ".desktop" entries start appearing on the Gnome menu
but in a submenu "Other" (I think... it's been a while since I was at
this stage). To get the entries into the menu structure required you
need to edit the configuration file for the Gnome menu, this is found in
/etc/xdg/menus

Again, to be "tidy" I add the minimum number of lines to the distributed
configuration file and put all my extra bits in an included file. The
following few lines are added to the end of "applications.menu"

/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu

   ....................
   ....................
  <MergeFile>applications-kmenuedit.menu</MergeFile>

  <!-- Remote Logins 4 lines added by FAS -->
  <Menu>
    <Name>Remote</Name>
    <MergeFile>Remote.menu</MergeFile>
  </Menu>  <!-- End Remote Logins -->

</Menu> <!-- End Applications -->

An the file Remote.menu referred to above looks like this...

/etc/xdg/menus/Remote.menu

<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/1.0/menu.dtd";>

  <!-- Remote Logins -->
  <Menu>
    <Name>Remote</Name>
    <Directory>Remote.directory</Directory>
    <Include>
      <And>
        <Category>Remote</Category>
        <Not><Category>Thor</Category></Not>
      </And>
    </Include>

    <Menu>
      <Name>Thor</Name>
      <Directory>Remote-Thor.directory</Directory>
      <Include>
        <And>
          <Category>Remote</Category>
          <Category>Thor</Category>
        </And>
      </Include>
    </Menu>

   </Menu>  <!-- End Remote Logins -->

This is where the "Categories" come in and split the ".desktop" entries
into different menus.  My actual "Remote.menu" file has many many more
entries than this, but hopefully this minimal version will be enough to
see what is going on.

After editing the files in /etc/xdg/menus I have found I need to restart
Gnome to have the changes take effect, I suspect there may be a way to
avoid this but I don't know what it is!!

FAS