Kickoff Menu Config

[Duncan]

Eric Griffith posted on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 03:21:17 -0400 as excerpted:

> Hey guys, I've got 2 hdd's in my laptop and I've been distro jumping
> enough lately that I set the second drive to be "/personal" with
> Documents/Videos/Music/Games etc in there, and then when I install a new
> distro I delete the folders in my /home, go to /personal, drag
> everything back to home and click "link here" It works great and solve
> 99% of my issues. Except one.

Traditionally, one simply puts /home on its own partition, and installs 
don't touch home except for (optional) user creation, which is otherwise 
done afterward.  An admin then mounts /home and adjusts user/group 
numbers for accounts found there to match what's already on the 
preexisting /home. (This is done by editing the appropriate user and 
group files in /etc, either as part of user creation or immediately 
before/after user creation.)

> As I mentioned above, I have a games folder where I keep some wine based
> games that I play a lot. And its really to have to everytime I install a
> new distro go into the Kickoff Configuration settings, and manually add
> back to the entries for each game one at a time.
> 
> Really, I guess my question is this; where does KDE keep the config
> files for Kickoff menu? And is there really anyway I could,
> realistically and practically, automate adding the entries back in? I
> don't know how KDE stores the entries so I dont know if a script would
> be appropriate, or if this is just one of those 'bite the bullet and do
> it yourself' situations.

One caveat to the below:  I dumped proprietary years ago and in general 
couldn't legally install or run anything proprietary even if I wanted to, 
since I can't agree to the EULAs, etc, which normally means the copyright 
owners don't grant me permission to copy and run their executables even 
if I'd want to.  And for freedomware there's generally more choice on 
Linux than on MS platforms so there's little reason I'd be interested in 
wine, and indeed, I've never even had it installed.  (Back before I 
switched to Linux instead of downgrading to eXPrivacy from MS Windows 98, 
I thought I might have to run wine for some things, but was pleasantly 
surprised to find native freedomware Linux apps to fill my needs.  So I 
never ended up installing wine at all.)  As such, to the extent that wine 
apps may have rules and behavior differing from the below, I wouldn't 
know it.

Sounds like you need to read the kde sysadmin guide, found here:

http://techbase.kde.org/SysAdmin

In particular, you need the information on the environmental vars related 
to filesystem location, both kde-specific and xdg/freedesktop.org.  Those 
are found here, under filesystem (#4) and fredesktop.org (#8).

http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/Environment_Variables

Specifically, you're interested in $KDEHOME (4.2) $XDG_DATA_HOME (9.1) 
and XDG_CONFIG_HOME (9.2), as well as possibly the system parallels to 
them, KDEDIRS (4.1), XDG_DATA_DIRS (9.3) and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (9.4).

However, given that you mentioned scripting, it sounds like you're 
advanced enough that you may find the whole guide interesting, or if you 
don't have time for all that, at least the whole section on environmental 
variables, not just the ones mentioned above.

Condensing the information found at the locations above...

KDE's config comes from multiple places.  In order of priority, there's 
the environmental vars, then three locations in $HOME (as listed in the 
environmental vars if set), three in the system (again, environmental 
vars if set), and finally, built-in app-defaults, for stuff not found in 
any of the earlier config locations.

Generally speaking, MOST of kde's config resides in $KDEHOME ($HOME/.kde 
by default, .kde4 on some distros), with a parallel location in $KDEDIRS 
(/usr on most distros, occasionally /opt).

In practice, that means most user config in the $HOME/.kde/share/apps and 
config subdirs (config containing individual files, apps containing app-
specific subdirs).  If a specific user's config hasn't been set, the 
fallback is then to the parallel system dir locations, very often
/usr/share/apps and /usr/share/config.

However, since kde follows the freedesktop.org/xdg configuration 
standards, menus are not kept in $KDEHOME (and the system parallel 
thereof, $KDEDIRS) but rather in $XDG_DATA_HOME, normally
$HOME/.local/share/applications (and the system parallel thereof, 
$XDG_DATA_DIRS, often /usr/share/applications).

Thus, simply setting/exporting the variables appropriately should do the 
trick.  Alternatively, you'll probably find your customized menu changes 
in the above filesystem locations, most likely $HOME/.local/share/
applications.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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