Xfce Forum

Alan Meyer

Member

Registered: 2011-11-15

Posts: 6

Settings entry disappeared from application menu

When clicking Applications Menu > System, I'm pretty sure that a menu entry appeared called "system settings", or "settings manager", or something like that.  It brought up a graphical menu of all of the available system settings programs.

This no longer appears in the System menu.  I presume I did something that made it go away, but I don't know what it was.

Does anyone have any ideas about 1) how to get it back and perhaps 2) what I did that could have made it go away, so I'll know not to do that again?

Thanks.

angstrom

Member

Registered: 2011-08-13

Posts: 267

Re: Settings entry disappeared from application menu

Please at least give us informations about your system : Which distro ? Which version ?

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Xfce is NOT Xubuntu. Bugs in Xubuntu don't mean that Xfce is buggy ...

Alan Meyer

Member

Registered: 2011-11-15

Posts: 6

Re: Settings entry disappeared from application menu

I'm using Ubuntu 11.10.  It's not xubuntu.  I switched to xfce after deciding that I wasn't happy with Unity or Gnome 3.

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

Website

Re: Settings entry disappeared from application menu

The desktop file is part of xfce4-session.

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Alan Meyer

Member

Registered: 2011-11-15

Posts: 6

Re: Settings entry disappeared from application menu

Thanks Nick but I'm having trouble understanding your clue.

It looks like the program that disappeared from the menu and that I would like to reappear is "xfce4-settings-manager".  I presume that there's a configuration file or hierarchy of files  somewhere that names all of the programs on the applications menu.  Can you point me to where that might be?  Is there a GUI to use in editing it or should I just edit it by hand?  Or am I wrong in thinking that such a file exists.

I've been hunting in various places and all sorts of related stuff, but still haven't succeeded in restoring the program to the menu.  I found a GUI menu editor in Python named "alacarte" which shows it being in the menu now, but in fact it isn't in the actual menu.  alacarte actually works if I use it to disable or re-enable a menu entry but, although "System Settings" is enabled (checked) in the alacarte menu display, it still doesn't appear in the actual menu.  If I click the "Properties" or "New Item" buttons in alacarte, MainWindow.py raises an OSError.  Tracing through the program with a debugger I see it's looking for a directory named '/home/alan/.local/share/applications/alacarte-made.desktop', which doesn't exist.

This is not really a serious problem.  All of the entries in the settings manager menu also appear outside it, and I can even run the settings manager from the command line.  However I was hoping that there was a well established way to fix menu problems like this.  I'm sure there is one, but it looks like I'm going to have to learn a lot more than I set out to learn in order to  have much hope of editing the menus. ... Sigh.

angstrom

Member

Registered: 2011-08-13

Posts: 267

Re: Settings entry disappeared from application menu

In Xfce, menu entries (like the one of xfce4-settings-manager) are defined by .desktop file. They are usually located in  /usr/share/applications/

As I understand, when an application want to appear in Menu entry, they must have a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/, which define in which category it is, its name, its description, comand to run, etc ... (for more, see http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=6550)

So, in your case, I supposed that some .desktop file are missing. So the simplest way is to re-install the packages which normally contain those .desktop : xfce4-session, xfce4-settings, etc ... Try to look inside those packages if there is some .desktop file ? If not, try to ask on Ubuntu forum as this problem is distro specific and it depends on how distro's packagers made Xfce packages.

Hopping that my phrases are not too confusing ...

Last edited by angstrom (2011-12-04 22:16:57)

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Xfce is NOT Xubuntu. Bugs in Xubuntu don't mean that Xfce is buggy ...

Alan Meyer

Member

Registered: 2011-11-15

Posts: 6

Re: Settings entry disappeared from application menu

Thank you angstrom.

I'm going out of town for a couple of weeks and won't have access to the computer with the problem, but I'll investigate again when I get back and try to apply your suggestions.

Alan