Kickoff Menu Config

Tue Aug 2 18:49:01 BST 2011

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan at cox.net> wrote:
> 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.)
>

And I used to do that, Duncan, putting /home seperately, but I stopped
after I had a cluster-fsck when switching distros with different
package versions that required different style configs... lets just
say it was ugly when I logged in after installing. Besides I like to
know what the 'default feel' of a distro, and if it automaticaly knows
to load my themes / wallpapers / sounds and stuff like that, then I
don't know what the devs worked so hard on. So, this set up lets me
just keep my actual files.

>> 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.

And thats all well and good :) I've even found a few Linux-native
games that I enjoy very much. But you can't really replace the
classics like the Baldur's Gate saga, Icewind Dale, and the likes
haha.

> 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.
>

Thanks for the knowledge bump Duncan, found the files I was looking for :)

> 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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