setting up menu entries for the very many packages installed, for the window/desktop systems available is one of the nightmares of linux.
list all the binaries on your system that you may want to start from the "start" menu on your desktop. Multiply by the number of different window managers in existent. Add to that the fact that at the same time you should set up mime/magic types, so that (e.g) avi files have an application, or many applications, associated with them. Multiply by the fact that different users have a different idea of which media player should be the default. Add to that the fact that for a given file type you may not only want to view/play it, but you may also want to edit it, and you can see that there is a lot of stuff to consider. It's therefore not surprising that different distros have different stuff on the menus. Debian have a good system for managing this problem. Mandrake copied it. The debian system basically requires the packager to include some generic information about menu and mime types in the package. This is stored in a repository on your hard drive. From there each window/desktop manager has a script to convert from the "generic" description in the package to the window manager's native format. In that way the package does not need to allow for every possible window manager, and new window managers (or new versions of existing ones) can be catered for by a single script tying the generic description to their own format. Each window manager will end up with an identical set of menus. Sweet. Other distros like gentoo have some sort of script that guesses what should be in the menus by some sort of search and guess algorithm. IMHO the debian way is better. as a concrete example here is the generic entry for mplayer-gui from a mandrake package: ?package(mplayer-gui): command="/usr/bin/gmplayer -quiet -nofs" needs="X11" section="Multimedia/Video" icon=" gmplayer.png" mimetypes="video/mpeg,video/msvideo,video/quicktime,video/x-avi,video/x-ms-asf,video/x-ms-wmv,video/x-msvideo, application/x-ogg,audio/x-mp3,audio/x-mpeg,video/x-fli,audio/x-wav" accept_url="true" multiple_files="true" title= "MPlayer" longtitle="Movie player for linux" It has everything that the system needs to know to create a menu entry for any desktop. On Mon, 09 May 2005 11:20:34 +1200 Ross Drummond wrote: > Not on a Mandrake 10 Official default installation. > > I do not know why this is as earlier versions had it. > > Cheers Ross Drummond > > On Mon, 09 May 2005 06:30, Robert Fisher wrote: > > On Sun, 08 May 2005 22:47, Ross Drummond wrote: > > > My method of file wrangling as root is to use Konqueror from a link on my > > > kde desktop. > > > > > > <method mode="long winded"> > > > > What is wrong with > > System>More Applications>File Manager-Super User Mode > > > > Standard in most versions of KDE I believe. -- Nick Rout
