If your Debian menu in GNOME ever disappears
I recently had my Debian menu in GNOME disappear for reasons I could not explain. Since this is where the launcher for many of the applications one installs are typically housed, it was quite the inconvenience. I posted to the debian-user mailing list, and asked around on IRC in #debian and #debian-devel, but the most I ever received was a suggestion to run 'update-menus' from a command line. Having done that within the first 30 minutes of the issue’s appearance to no avail, I resigned myself to making do without the menu for the time being.
Uninstalling and reinstalling the menu package was of no help. Reinstalling the gnome package yielded no joy, either. I could examine the contents of /var/lib/gnome and see that the menu structure was being built, it just wasn’t making into the menu.
Through some poking around and talking with some folks who emailed me off-list to admit that they, too, had experienced this and were at a loss, the mystery has been solved. Apparently during some upgrade to packages, the menu-xdg package had been removed. Reinstalling it restored the menu to its formerly visible and altogether handy state. I posted a follow-up reply to debian-user in hopes of it helping posterity.
This issue must seem like such a stupid or neophyte question that some people refrain from replying to a mailing list post about it. For those who knew the answer (I assume someone did), the question must have somehow seemed unworthy of reply. However, looking at the menu package, I don’t even see a Suggests entry for menu-xdg. It would be a shame if there are other people facing this issue with no resolution, so I am openly admitting that I had this problem in the hopes that it helps someone else out. Perhaps I should file some sort of wishlist bug, but my knowledge of the menu system is still narrow; maybe I will.
I find myself periodically expanding the Debian menu on my desktop just to look at it and enjoy that warm, cozy feeling I get from having it back. 8^)
Care to weigh in on this bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/333848
Comment by Ben Finney — October 14, 2005 @ 4:12 am
Ben, thanks for the link! I added my input on that bug report.
Comment by Barry Hawkins — October 14, 2005 @ 10:00 am
apt-cache rdepends menu-xdg in sid shows some packages depending more or less on menu-xdg:
Package: desktop-profiles
Suggests: menu-xdg
Package: education-desktop-kde
Recommends: menu-xdg
Package: gnome-panel
Suggests: menu-xdg (>= 0.2)
Package: kdelibs-bin
Depends: menu-xdg
Comment by Ingo Saitz — October 15, 2005 @ 7:34 pm
Yes, Bill Alombert pointed me to Bug #322517; this problem keeps occuring because GNOME still only suggests menu-xdg, even though nearly everyone expects this menu to always present. Note that KDE appropriately depends upon menu-xdg.
Comment by Barry Hawkins — October 15, 2005 @ 8:24 pm
One final step for me: I had installed menu-xdg, but after a reboot there was still no Debian menu. All was well, however, after running dpkg-reconfigure menu and dpkg-reconfigure menu-xdg.
Ben
Comment by Ben Hanson — November 22, 2005 @ 2:48 pm
Hi Barry,
Thanks, this really was useful for me. I missed the debian menus a lot.
Suresh
Comment by Suresh Rajashekara — December 31, 2005 @ 3:21 am
Hi Suresh,
You’re welcome! Yeah, I remember how happy I was to have those back myself.
Barry
Comment by Barry Hawkins — December 31, 2005 @ 8:06 am
Hi
apt-get install menu-xdg was the clue. I spent almost hours on the problem how to get the debian menu entry back. Thank you for the posting. Great work! Btw, happy new year ;-)
Adrian
Comment by Adrian — January 5, 2006 @ 1:47 am
Thanks for the clue! It seems that I had a similar problem. I got back the “Applications” menu just by reinstalling menu-xdg (the same version already installed). I lost it yesterday when I updated “etch” using the version 20060118 of the DVDs (I was using 20051104 previously; menu-xdg was one of the updated packages). Actually the problem was that every time I clicked that menu, it appeared for less than a tenth of a second and then disappeared. I thought the cause was gconf2, because its version was 2.12 when all the other gnome packages were 2.10, so I downgraded it, but it solved nothing. In fact I’m not sure if it has something to do with the problem because I still keep the downgraded version. I suppose not.
Alberto
Comment by Alberto — January 21, 2006 @ 9:04 am
Not fit for my desktop yet. that must be a huge hole for the debian families’ beginner such as me.
Comment by lyxmoo — January 11, 2007 @ 2:07 pm
Hi. I have menu-xdg installed, but no despite this there’s no Debian menu among the GNOME menu…
Comment by h — August 8, 2007 @ 4:05 pm
Thanks for the article. h, make sure alacarte is installed.
Comment by sixerjman — October 9, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
Also, select System/Preferences/Main Menu, then Applications and see if you have ‘Debian’ there. If so, check the submenus under Debian you would like to have.
See also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=444402.
Comment by sixerjman — October 9, 2007 @ 6:07 pm