Mandrake 9.2 desktop shortcuts (?) stop working after installing security patches
 

I just started using linux for the first time the other day (other than knoppix.) I successfully and reasonably painlessly installed mandrake 9.2 on a system I had sitting around.

Earlier today I downloaded some security patches with the autoupdate feature as well as set up the firewall that comes with Mandrake. Shortly, if not immediately, after this I noticed that a large number of the links to programs in the program menu (?) were missing. Additionally I had created a shortcut to Konqueror earlier by dragging the shortcut from the menu onto the dekstop. This was renamed to konqueror.desktop and the icon changed. I rebooted several times, as well as created a new user. Everything was still the same.

There is also a newbie popup window when Mandrake starts. I had not disabled it yet. When I would click on the links in this window none of them would work either.

I did manage to figure out where the programs are on the HD, and I can run them. Right now I'm trying to decide if its worth reinstalling mandrake as I really dont have enough knowlege of linux to do much else. In other words this is not much of a lifethreatening problem.

The only thing I think may have happened is that I improperly shut the machine down. Some site I read said this could damage the file system. (duh!)

Does anyone have an thoughts, suggestions, or otherwise useful comments that might be helpful to me?

Despite having regularly read slashdot for years, I am a complete :newbie: to linux at the moment.

note: (?) means I'm not sure if this is the technically correct term

If you have access to a console type in "update-menus -v" without the quotes.
If Konsole is one of the things missing from your menus or you cant open a console from somewhere else then try the same command in the "run" dialog box.

Forgot to tell you the above fix brought back my menus but did not cause shortcuts to start working again. I made new shortcuts and deleted the old. worked ok for me

good luck and welcome to LQ

Continued gratitude to all those who help us newbies

Thank you! Worked for me. And it did restore functionality to my existing desktop icons as well (home, trash, floppy, and cd were all non-functional).

It seemed to hang while running, when it got to the command:
"Running method: /etc/menu-methods/simplified//gnome"
it just got stuck there every time, even running as su root.

As a precaution I deleted and readded my two user accounts. All looks fine.

Thanks again.
Lee

Leeb,
Extremly glad to have helped, I'll remember the fix can sometimes restore desktop icon functionality.

At the point you thought it seemed to hang, it was finished. At that point all you needed to do was heit enter and the prompt would have come back up.

Thanks! It appears to work. A few errors popped up while running the command about not being able to create files because such and such didn't exist, but otherwise it appears I have menu functionability once again.