[kde-linux] Virtualbox start icon missing

[Kevin Krammer]

Hi Mark.,

On Thursday, 2014-03-20, 15:52:23, Mark Knecht wrote:

>    I run Gentoo Linux and Virtualbox-4.3.8 on 3 different machines. On
> all of these machines when I've emerged Virtualbox I get, in the KDE
> menu system, under the heading Applications->System, an "Oracle xVM
> Virtualbox" icon where I can start the program. I typically right
> click and add this to the Favorites menu and I'm good to go.
> 
>   My son, now in his 20's, has decided it's time to move past being a
> Windows gamer and get more serious and decided he'd like to use Gentoo
> (me managing it remotely) but he needs a Windows VM for iTunes. To
> this end I've installed Gentoo on his machine and today installed
> Virtualbox. The install went fine but as you may have guessed by now
> there is no "Oracle xVM Virtualbox" icon anywhere to be found. (So
> far...)
> 
>    Why is it not where it is on all my other machines? If by chance
> it's somewhere in the KDE menus then how do I find it?

KDE, as well as pretty much every desktop environment on Linux, is using data 
from so called desktop-entry [1] files installed by applications to build its 
launcher menu or similar UI.

The files are installed by applications into certain paths which follow 
another specification [2] shared between Linux UI frameworks.

In a KDE session you can easily retrieve the full list search paths for 
.desktop files using the following command:

kde4-config --path xdgdata-apps

If you son's system is missing the entry for Virtual Box then either did the 
.desktop file not get installed or not into one of the search locations, or if 
it is installed, the installation failed to trigger the update mechanism.

In the latter case you can run that manually:

kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

Cheers,
Kevin

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/
[2] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/basedir-spec/

> 
>    This is a whole area that's very mysterious to me about KDE vs
> Windows. In Windows I can see properties of start icons by right
> clicking. In KDE I don't know how to do this. On the machines that
> have an icon in the menus I don't see how to tell what it's doing? I
> know it's running Virtualbox in this case but how does one determine
> what any general icon is doing? I've been reduced to watching for
> changes in top to see what program is started. I'm sure that's not the
> design goal here.
> 
>    Anyway, I want to learn how to manage these icons KDE has in the
> menus and would appreciate any pointers I can get, and thanks in
> advance for letting me vent. KDE is great but this part of it has
> frustrated me over and over again over the years.
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark
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-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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