Hi,

Can someone please explain to me how Mandrake 9.0 KDE menus work? I'm totally confused because the menu items I create using kmenuedit are always overwritten when I use menudrake. It seems like the menus are handled by some complex interactions among the following directories:

/usr/share/applnk
/usr/share/applnk-mdk
/etc/menu
/usr/lib/menu
~/.kde/share/applnk-mdk
~/.menu

This list is probably not exhaustive. This is confusing. I'll really appreciate it if someone can explain to me, or point me to a web site, how all these menu-related directories work together to produce the KDE menus. And can I somehow configure kmenuedit to save its menu items in the right place so they don't get overwrittem?

Furthermore, I think the Screensavers are also stored in these directories. Understanding these will probably help me solve my disappearing screensavers problem.

Thanks in advance.

I've had the same problem. In my case, modifications made using menudrake never appeared in my copy of the KDE menu. Drawing on your comment, I put a new shortcut (a .desktop file) in ~/.kde/share/applnk-mdk/Networking/ and everything was hunky-dory.

For now, I will eschew menudrake and try to just edit the ~/.kde/applnk subdirectories by hand. At least that works! The file formats are pretty much self-explanatory, IMHO.

I think that you can run MenuDrake, then click the icon for "MenuStyle". Select "Original Menu". If I am right you will now see the KDE or Gnome menu rather than the Mandrake menu. You will be able to use KMenuEdit to edit it.

(I say "think" because I have not tried it yet in 9.1, I did this in 9.0 and it worked).

DAVE

Thanks, davecs. The only thing I don't understand is ... what the heck does menudrake modify? I guess it's time to read the source.....

In general, I like the Mandrake tools, but some of them don't seem like improvements over ofther tools (e.g., the KDE user editor is manifestly superior to the Mandrake tool) ---they just duplicate functions, and cause confusion..... :-( But I suppose it isn't possible for Mandrake to embed the KDE tools in their perl framework, and they don't want to hide the KDE tools (although that might be a less confusing alternative).

The way KDE works under Mandrake, it can use more than one directory as a source for its menu. Selecting the different options in Menudrake not only decide which Menu Editor prevails, it also causes a different set of directories to be used.

There are some important differences between similar functions in KDE and Mandrake Control Centres. After a while you get to know what is best for each job. For example, to change the Desktop Startup Manager program to the KDE version, KDM, you need to select it under Mandrake CC, Hardware, Display Manager Chooser. Now to adjust what KDM looks like, you need KDE CC. If you want to run KDE on startup, and use MCC, KDM will be bypassed, and when you log out, you will get a two-choice menu. So in MCC you actually say you do NOT want automatic login, and then in KCC you set up KDM for automatic login. Now KDM runs, logs you in, and when you log out, you get the full choice of options.

The font installer in KCC is much better than in MCC. But MCC covers many things that KCC does not (and vice versa). You tend to work it out in the end.

DAVE