Hey,

I removed unity an now have cinnamon as my preferred desktop environment, Still present is Gnome fallback and fallback [no effects]. I have stayed away from clicking either at log in.

I have a couple thing one of which may not be all that much of a problem and that is duplication. When I click on 'Menu' The All applications is highlighted. Looking over the list of Apps,I have found seven duplications, well six duplicates, the seventh is a triplicate. The duplicates are Universal Access, System Settings, Region an Languages, Displays, Network,then Power. All these are duplicates however they are duplicates in name they may not be duplicates in functionality? At least I do not believe so? The one which has three is 'Online Accounts'.

My guess would be that half of them are related to Unity, left over, either that or they are related to a gnome shell that came along with some connection to the two gnome [fallback an no effects) 'apparent desktop' somethings??

The last time I was in a similar situation I made the mistake of clicking one of the Gnomes at login. Let us say the result was a disaster.

I am incline to leave well enough alone. However, how can I differentiate between the ones which are Cinnamon and those which could be Gnome connected? Can I rename half to indicate they are of Cinnamon? Am I making too big a deal of this??

Now on to the second issue. I downloaded a VMWare Player an when I right clicked, the first solution is for me to open it with 'gedit'
I had similar problems with others such as openSUSE iso, PinguyOS iso and others and they all were txt. I can not utilize any of the iso's for testing if they will not work through the VirtualBox and or the VMWare Player?

I have not emptied the Trash, which has me wondering whether in some bizarre way these duplicates an the problem with the downloads could be interconnected? On a wild thought I'm going to empty the trash an restart my PC and see.....

Have you tried all the duplicated menu entries?

Do you have the package "alacarte" installed?

You have the gnome fallback and probably fallback (don't understand the difference there) because you are using Cinnamon. It is simply a replacement shell for Gnome. It replaces Gnome Shell.

So I would not worry to much about them. You only have them in case the shell won't open due to your graphics not being up to the compositing. Your obviously is up to it.

Alacarte is an application for editing the Gnome menu. Used to be able to open it by right clicking on the application menu button. Don't know if that works or not in Gnome3. Could be in your menu. You should in any case be able to open it in a terminal at the user prompt ($) with;
This should open a box for editing your menu. This will allow you to look at the command that is used to open any of the items on there.

You can add things to the menu. Remove things from the menu.

Removing is pretty easy and fairly self explanatory. You should try the entries and see if they work before removing them. The ones that work you can look at more closely and see what the command is. Then look at the ones that don't and see what they have in the command line. Should be something different thus causing the entry to not work. That would be interesting to know.

The duplication is puzzling. Would be good to know the cause.

The VM question should really be in a separate thread so that people with a similar problem can find it with a forum search.

widget,
This is what i got after entering 'alacarte' in the terminal



(alacarte:4912): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_accel_label_set_accel_closure: assertion 'gtk_accel_group_from_accel_closure (accel_closure) != NULL' failed

(alacarte:4912): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_accel_label_set_accel_closure: assertion 'gtk_accel_group_from_accel_closure (accel_closure) != NULL' failed

Look in your software manager (Ubuntu Software Center) and search for menu. If Alacarte is installed it will show in the search results. I don't know enough about Cinnamon to know what the corresponding package names are for each package fork.

You may want to take a look at this bug report on Mint's GitHub page.

k3lt01,

I ran alacarte again while I got the same messages as before I also got a pop up of the Menu. I made changes only relating to Cinnamon.

I don't like the sound of the health of your install.

It could be just a known bug for either Gnome, Cinnamon or alacarte though. I haven't looked it up.

Only thing I can say is that my Cinnamon is running fine on both LMDE 32 and 64 bit installs on my loaner drive. Should be about the same versions of all packages.

I am not sure if I have alacarte installed or not. Using the LMDE menu system and, frankly, don't even know if alacarte works with it.

Okay, you are running Cinnamon so you know that it has functions that Gnome does not, I'm referring to the 'Advance Mode' I took a screenshot of the Cinnamon System Settings and the Gnome System Settings. There are some of the function that work with Gnome and some works with Cinnamon. I have two Main Menu's one the Gnome 'Alacarte'? and the other Cinnamon. They both show which programs are in their thingamajig. I wonder how much trouble would i be in if I were to try and delete the Gnome Main Menu? Barring that could open it up and delete those doubles that I have in Cinnamon?

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Is there a reason why you have both Gnome and Cinnamon? If you don't need Gnome why don't you just remove it?

OK. You are a real pain. I fired up the loaner drive, just for you.

Hey, thanks, you make a great excuse. I have not switched over to it as I am in the middle of a run on here but I am opening a chroot to both my installs so the files will be mounted here.

As LMDE is the 3rd pair of installs I am running my chroots and upgraded and that starts with 1 and I am just about to get to LMDE.

In the mean time alacarte is not a menu. It is a menu editor for gnome.

If you are not getting rid of the duplicates we need to find where the menu lives in the files. I don't remember exactly at all.

OK, got it up. Have just looked at the ~/.foo files (hidden files) for the 64 bit install. Should be the same in both but I will check.

Remember that this is not Ubuntu with Cinnamon installed. This is Linux Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon and Mate installed. There may be some differences in where these files are.

There is no menu part in this file but it might be there in yours - ~/.local/share/cinnamon.

There is a ~/.linuxmint/mintMenu file in mine. You can check for that but is probably a different directory name. Could be ~/.cinnamon/minitMenu or maybe just Menu or something in yours. It could be what you need but I don't think it is all you need. I think that is adding things that are installed from Mate and, of coarse shown in the menu for Cinnamon.

What you need to do, seeing how alacarte doesn't appear to have done any thing for you. Is look at /etc/xdg/menus/cinnamon-applications.menu
and /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu. Alacarte should have edited at least that last one.

As you can see they both are about the same thing as far as syntax goes because they are both using the Freedesktop template.

Somewhere around line 18 you will see a reference to "Read in overrides and child menus from applications-merged". I think that refers to
~/.config/menus/applications-merged. In the case of my installs this directory is empty but you should check yous to see what is in there.

Looking in my /usr/share/applications directory I find that there is a cinnamon-menu-editor.desktop file. You should be able to either double click on that file in your user space file manager to open it or to use "cinnamon-menu-editor" in terminal to open it. I suggest the terminal so you get any error messages.

Didn't know that existed. Don't favor Cinnamon myself. Have it on there so people can see it. They may think it is just the greatest thing so they need the opportunity to see it. I have installed with Cinnamon and admit that I login to that DE when visiting to make sure the installs all work. I do log into Cinnamon but only to see if it works and if I can launch an application or two. Have never had an issue with the menu by the way.

That application should do for the Cinnamon menu the same thing alacarte is supposed to do for the Gnome menu. I am assuming that to be the case simply from the name. Have no experience with it at all. Just saw it now.

You should look in your /usr/share/applications directory. Could be there are duplicates in there for some reason. This is the list the menu entries are generated from. Double clicking on them should open the application. Duplicates are likely not to work. So if you have 2 or 3 entries for an application try them. If one works and the rest don't delete the ones that don't.

You will have to open the file browser as root to delete them. I have seen duplicate files and there should be a way to use the rm command to remove the files but they have the same name. Not sure how you would differentiate them.

The presence of duplicates is not normal so I hope that is not the problem. On the other hand it would explain the problem with the menus. It just raises a lot of other questions about why your system is generating bogus entries in your /usr/share/applications directory.

I have only seen this for broken applications in any of my installs of any linux. If the applications work well then there is some other, to me unknown, reason for the duplicates and what ever that can be it is not good.

That should keep you busy for a while.

I am planning on doing some work on another external drive. As I have the loaner running now I will go there first and see if I can get the Cinnamon menu editor to work. Learned of a new toy and need to play with it anyway.

Will also before leaving here, duplicate an application entry or two. See if they show up in the menu.

Kind of an interesting problem.

I take it you have seen this thread;
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ck-4175482892/

Could be a common problem if you think you are permitted to change the default DE and install other packages under Ubuntu.

Another problem with Cinnamon may be that Ubuntu 13.10 is based on Debian Sid (Debian Unstable). Sid is also the first Debian version to have Cinnamon in the repo.

I use Debian testing (currently Jessie) and it is not on the list. I have been over in my Sid install today but didn't think to look into Cinnamon when over there.

But this will hopefully be migrating to testing soon. It will much more stable when that happens. Ubuntu bases their LTS on Debian testing.

Could be it is just pretty buggy right now.
Edit;
http://release.debian.org/migration/...ckage=cinnamon

That is a link to an explanation of why Cinnamon has not migrated to testing yet.

This is gettimg way too complicated and confusing for me an my pea size brain. The problems they keep a comming. I do appreciate all the searching for an answer you have done to help me. At the present I see my having two choices, well actually three: one, do nothing an leave it as it is; two, use my Ubuntu 13.04 Disc and run it alongside the 13.10 and three, the riskiest is to istall an entirely diferent Linux distro and dual boot it with the Ubuntu?
For the time being I am favoring choice number one,leave things alone.

You said I would need Root privaleges, I thought I already had them but apparently not. How do I get them?

Under Ubuntu you would use the sudo command in terminal.

If you are talking about using the file manager and that is nemo (pretty sure that is it) it would be;
Should open nemo with root permissions. It is important to understand that you can then, if you wanted to, do things like delete your entire file system. They don't run well after you do this.

Opening individual files with a text editor is more common and safe practice.

For instance to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list to add or remove something would be;
Where "gedit" is the text editor of your choice. The command as is will open the text editor gedit with the sources.list file open on it and you will have permission to change it. You make your changes and use the "save as" option in the File menu for gedit to save the file.

So back to your problem. You are saying that the thing to do is continue using a completely faulty OS rather than have one that actually works?

I think I would go with installing another on a dual boot or simply installing another distro that works all by it self. Certainly be less time and trouble than you have been going through lately.

You certainly have a good point there about concerning installing aother OS (Linux). Either dual booting it with the Ubuntu 13.10 or use the new Linux as the one and only Linux OS on my machine.

I have five possibilies; Fedora 19 Desktop, openSUSE 12.3 Live KDE,
Mageia 3 KDE 4, Porteus 2.1 Razor QT (it's a slackware derivative an not for installing on a Hard Disc),an lastly Arch Linux 2013.10.01.

I am leery about mssing with anything I know less about. So I don't think I'll be using that: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list .

It is foolish of me to continue using the set up I currently have. Okay, I've decide to install a new OS. I am down to Mageia 3, openSUSUE or Fedora 19.

herakles_14

I have never messed with openSuse but know people that think it is the cats meow.

All the distros you mention as your final three are from the RH branch of Linux and the installers tend to be hostile to other Linux installs if not watched carefully during the selection of mount points for each partition.

The exception to this is Fedora which should be easy to dual boot with.

If you are not wanting to dual boot there is no problem at all with any distro.

Mageia 3 is from the Mandrake fork of the RH branch of Linux. Mandrake was the first "user friendly" distro. It aimed to be from the start. The MCC (Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia Control Center) is very arguably the nicest general gui configuration tool around.

I have it on my loaner drive with Gnome and KDE installed on both the 32 and 64 bit installs. Frankly as an old Gnome user it hurts to say that when I log into either of them I prefer KDE that I have always disliked a lot. Still do but prefer it, now, to what Gnome has become.

I can say that I have had no trouble with both being installed either. They have different menu set up, different DE specific config tools and share the MCC with no noticeable conflicts.

It has been out for some time now and is very mature and, as far as I can tell, very stable.

You should probably drop me a PM if you want more general information. This is, after all, the Ubuntu section.