Hi,

kickoffs menu editor seems not to work for me: I'ld like to add an entry for Mathematica's startup shell script. I start the menu editor by selecting it from kickoff's context menu, add a "New Item", select an icon and fill out all fields. The Mathematica menu entry appears in the menu editors view of the menu. After I click "Save" I see the "Updating system configuration" progress bar.

But finally no menu entry is generated, no error messages show up, kickoffs menu seems to be completely unchanged.

KDE Version is Trunk build by kdesvn-build-1.7.1 tonight.

Thanks for any help in advance,
Frank

Bug confirmed. Also affects "Menu updating tool" which adds non KDE applications to the menu. Please search for existing bugs, and if none exist please file one.

Could you please post a link here for future searchers once done? Thanks in advance.

I can't seem to reproduce it. Are you adding it "inside" a category? If not, try expanding "Utilities", click on "Ark" (or anything inside utilities) and then click "New Item".
Works perfectly for me.

bcooksley wrote:Could you please post a link here for future searchers once done? Thanks in advance.

Done: Bug report[hr]

LinuxIsInnovation wrote:I can't seem to reproduce it. Are you adding it "inside" a category? If not, try expanding "Utilities", click on "Ark" (or anything inside utilities) and then click "New Item".
Works perfectly for me.

Tried exactly that (well the category was "education" and the app "blinken", but I guess that doesn't matter).

No avail.

I also tried to add a "minimalistic" entry: Top-level menu entry, just name and path to shell script. Didn't work.

Is there anything else I could try to give more information?

I didn't try, so I don't know if I have this bug, but you could try this:
-Select an item and press Copy (on the topbar)
-Select the category where you would like to have yor New Item and press Paste (on the top bar).
This should make you a copy of the first item in the new place you've choose.
-Edit the info (icon, command, name, description etc..) from the copy and change it by the info of the new item that you would like to create.
-Apply.

I don't know, but perhaps it works....
good luck

Thanks for the help, but that also didn't not work.

Is there a way to get more verbatim output from the "Update system configuration" process?

IIRC in old KDE versions I also was able to manually generate menu entries by creating a small text file. Is this still possible in KDE 4?

Try adding an entry to: /home//.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu

LinuxIsInnovation wrote:Try adding an entry to: /home//.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu

OK, thanks for the hint: There seem to be some mess left over from the previous tries to get the menu entry. In that file I find the lines

Code: Select all

 
  Mathematica-5.desktop
  Mathematica-6.desktop
 
 
  Mathematica-2.desktop
  Mathematica-7.desktop
 


Should I delete this section before trying to add the menu entry manually? And where are the *.desktop files located?

Try cleaning up all Mathematica references and try adding again.
If it does not work, try launching kmenuedit as root from konsole.

KMenuEdit now works correctly for me, now running a few hours old SVN trunk. I updated the bug to the KMenuEdit application to reflect the application where the bug was.

LinuxIsInnovation wrote:Try cleaning up all Mathematica references and try adding again.
If it does not work, try launching kmenuedit as root from konsole.

Sorry for not relying that long!

It still does not work. I even deleted the whole ~/.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu and let kmenuedit rebuild a new one from scratch. No avail.

Launching kmenuedit as root is not that easy, since this is a kdesvn-build version, which is build in my home directory. I guess that could be a reason for all that trouble, since I have a systemwide 4.1.3 installation.

My startup script, which is ~/startkde4 in my home directory

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

export QTDIR=/home/username/qt4
export PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH


export KDEDIR=/home/username/kde
export PATH=$KDEDIR/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$KDEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=$KDEDIR/lib/kde4/plugins
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR

export KDEHOME=$HOME/.kde4-svn

export QTEST_COLORED=1
export KDE_COLOR_DEBUG=1
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/home/username/kde/share:/usr/share:/usr/local/share

kde/bin/startkde


(Replaced my username with "username" for the sake of anomymity)

Could it be that some environment variables are missing, so kmenuedit mixes up my SVN Version with the system wide Version?

Your script seems fine. I do remember an issue where KMenuEdit was broken, but it has been subsequently fixed. Could you try with the latest SVN?

Note: KMenuEdit is not designed to be run as root.

I rebuild my KDE SVN installation on a nearly-daily basis, last time was last night. It still doesn't work.

*But* as I'm on Gentoo and the 4.1.3 update came in today I switched to the KDE use flag "kdeprefix", which means that all files of the system wide 4.1.3 installation will go into /usr/kde/4.1/ instead of getting spread over the system into locations like /usr/bin, /usr/lib ...

I thought that setting up the correct order in env vars like PATH would avoid any problems with mixed up installations, but I'll report back if explicit disabling 4.1 paths solved the problem, when the merge is finished.

Thanks for all that support. Good forum, with helpful and pleasant users and admins!

OK, the system wide 4.1.3 "kdeprefix" merge finished. kmenu still does not work

But something had changed. For example the konsole entry in kickoff, wich I added to the favourites in my SVN installation did not work anymore. After deleting and re-adding it it works again. Strange, and confirms me in believing that something is wrong with my installation.

As I can't give any more helpful information and it seems more and more like a local problem, I'll close the bug on b.k.o. One Bug less in the statistics for the 4.2 release

Nice sideffect: I noticed a four year old bur report (wishlist) on b.k.o. The feature I requested is in the meantime implemented in current SVN, so it makes two bugs less. Hey, I'm a good "KDE-developer" today

I'm also experiencing this problem on the latest alpha release of Kubuntu, KDE 4.2.1. I can delete items from the kmenu but I can't add items. I thought it was a permission problem but I checked all the permissions and everything looks good.

Grant