Hi all, I've spent several days tinkering with Wine and have uncovered what seems to be a mess: Menus in Gnome for Wine applications... I'm running Debian 4.0 (Etch) with a few backports, and Gnome 2.14.3. I've progressed from the version of Wine that's in the Etch repositories, 0.9.25-2.1, through the one in backports, 1.0-rc1-1, to the current 1.1.1 from the WineHQ repositories. All were installed with either apt-get or Synaptic. There seems to be some mechanism in place in the Debian implementation of Wine under Gnome that attempts to create menu entries for the Wine configuration and Uninstall programs and any installed Wine applications in the main Gnome Applications menu. I say "attempts" because it's buggy as heck. I ran the installer for a program, MagicISO, which created a directory in Program Files containing about 4 different things, at least two of which should have had menu entries. Instead, only the Uninstall applet showed up and there was no entry for the program itself. No problem! I can just make a new menu entry myself, right? NOPE!! [Rolling Eyes] It turns out that the very nice menu editor for the Gnome menus, a program called Alecarte, does not even display the Wine sub-menu that was created and updated during the installation of wine and subsequent applications. After several days of experimenting, the only thing I've managed to do is to break things further. If you Google 'gnome menus wine' you'll see many reports of broken, missing, un-editable or unremovable Gnome menus in Debian and the various Ubuntus, with no easy or reliable answer, and many partial, inconsistent, and inevitably primitive approaches being suggested. As of now, I think I have finally succeeded in completely uninstalling and purging the old version of Wine and all its configuration and data files, and doing a fresh install of the current beta release from WineHQ. Installing that version tells me that the creation of nice, tidy gnome menu entries is not within the scope of the Wine project itself. Is that correct? If so, then do you have any suggestions or maybe a broader perspective on why this situation exists and what, if anything, might be happening and where I can learn more? Or if I'm missing something obvious, please clue me in! [Laughing] It won't be the last time I'm proven clueless with this Linux thing! Be well, Mike D.
mdevour wrote:> There seems to be some mechanism in place in the Debian implementation of Wine under Gnome that attempts to create menu entries for the Wine configuration and Uninstall programs and any installed Wine applications in the main Gnome Applications menu. I say "attempts" because it's buggy as heck.Please be specific what didn't work? If you let Wine do everything it works in 99% cases. If you try and start "editing" something without knowing what you doing - the chances are pretty good you'll break it. mdevour wrote:> Instead, only the Uninstall applet showed up and there was no entry for the program itself.How do you know what should be there? Did you checked under windows? Also have you verified that installation actually exited? Wine will wait until install is complete to create some icons. And sometimes installers hang. mdevour wrote:> It turns out that the very nice menu editor for the Gnome menus, a program called Alecarte, does not even display the Wine sub-menu that was created and updated during the installation of wine and subsequent applications.You should report this bug to creators of this program. Wine follows XDG standard when creating menu entries. If it doesn't work with your menu editor - it's not standard complaint. mdevour wrote:> Installing that version tells me that the creation of nice, tidy gnome menu entries is not within the scope of the Wine project itself. Is that correct?You probably missunderstood that part. Wine can and does create correct menu and desktop entries for every installed program. In the same way they would appear on windows. And it works in most cases. However vanilla Wine does not create any entries for itself (ex: winecfg, notepad, winefile, etc). Also note that Wine does not remove menu/desktop entries on program uninstall. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10277
dimesio wrote:> In Windows, does MagicISO add itself to the menu? I think (I could be wrong) that winemenubuilder reads what the app would insert into the Windows menu and translates that into a Gnome or KDE menu entry, but if the app doesn't add a menu entry for itself in Windows, Wine couldn't do it either.Hi dimesio, Well, I know that with my previous wine install it did create a desktop icon and a menu entry for at least the uninstaller app.> Have you tried installing any other programs in Wine to see if they get added to the Gnome menu?Not on this install, but before I wiped it I had Microsoft Office '97 working about as well as it would work on this machine... and menu items galore!> The one other thing I can think of is, have you manually added any entries directly under Wine in the menu hierarchy (rather than using the convoluted array of submenus it like to create)? I found that in KDE doing that has prevented Wine from ever adding another entry to my menu. (Which is fine with me; I never wanted all that crap in my menus anyway.)On the last install, yes, I did manage to create a menu entry using some CLI trick or other which I don't remember the details of. Right now, menu-related activity is completely broken. Since I manually scrubbed the .wine directory and some menu items in, I think, .local and maybe .config, and re-installed the new version from WineHQ, there are no Wine, Wine configuration, or Wine uninstall menu items like there were before, and installing this one program (MagicISO) doesn't trigger the creation of anything new, menu-wise. I suppose I should try installing Office 97 again and see what that might shake loose. Thanks for your input, Mike D.