how to modify "start" menu in FC3-KDE desktop?

quixote9 · 05-28-2005, 10:45 PM

This has got to be a dumb question, but I just can't find the answer. I would like to alter the "start menu" that came with my Core 3. It came pre-installed with the computer, and does not have a menu choice for detailed changes to the main menu. (Yes, I know I can generate a whole new menu of my own, but I don't want to do that. I just want to get rid of most of the choices I never use on the supplied menu.)

I have looked everywhere for .desktop files, for menu files, for anything. The closest I've come is the KDE menu editor, but the changes I make there don't seem to translate to the actual menu. I'd be perfectly happy to edit a text file by hand--it's not that I need a GUI--but I can't find that either.

Can anyone help?

w6bi · 05-28-2005, 11:21 PM

The program you want is kmenuedit.

You can launch it by using the mini-command line: Alt-F2.

HTH

Edit - I had the same problem with changes not sticking in some earlier versions of KDE. I've since upgraded to KDE 3.4, and it seems to work as advertised.

quixote9 · 05-30-2005, 12:03 AM

Um, this is kind of embarrassing. I found out after some more digging that I wasn't in KDE at all. (That would explain why the KDE menu editor wasn't working....) I was in Redhat's default Gnome desktop which, incomprehensibly, has the menus set to be uneditable. (Bumped into this tidbit in "Fedora Core 3" by Ball and Duff.)

They point out that changing /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf to the alternative file solves that problem. (Rename default-modules.conf.with-menu-editing to default-modules.conf after saving the original default under a new name like default-modules.conf.without-editing.) Well, yes, it worked, but the new default has no menus at all. One of my biggest problems--as with most newbies, I suspect--is just finding the damn files in Linux, so without menus I'm fairly hamstrung. I wanted to edit the system default, but that had disappeared.

So, anyway, that didn't really work for me, but at least I found out I wasn't in KDE. Once I switched to KDE, then, as you say, menu editor worked just fine.

All's well that ends well, right? Thanks for your reply!