Menus other than Mintmenu on Flux

[viking777]

It is difficult to know where to put this post because it doesn't relate to Fluxbox CE or even Linux Mint, I'll explain.

I run Fluxbox on top of various other desktop environments/window managers: Gnome, Xfce and Lxde, these are also on different distros, Gnome is on Mint and Debian Stable, Xfce is on Sidux and Lxde is on Pclinux.

To illustrate what I want to do on all these distros I will show you what I do on Mint where it is simplicity itself. This is part of my menu entry for Fluxbox running over Mint Gnome:

Code: Select all

[exec] (MintMenu) {mintmenu}<>

(I don't use icons)

I happen to put this in ~/.mint-fm2/submenus/Accessories but where it lives is not too important, what is important is that it works. It gives me access to all the Mint Menu items from within the Fluxbox desktop menu, which is incredibly more convenient than adding them one by one.

In fact it is so convenient that I also want to do it on all my other distros, but unlike Mint they do not have a command similar to 'mintmenu' they all use this HIDEOUS xdg menu system (and that is the main reason I use Fluxbox everywhere because xdg menus are so user unfriendly that they do Linux serious damage). Anyway I digress. What I would like to know is what command/commands would I have to put into my Fluxbox menu to, for example, get my Sidux Xfce menu to display in the same way that Mintmenu does?

Is it even possible?

Same question for the Debian menu in Debian stable and the Lxde menu in Pclos.

I know you can't put in the path to the applications.menu file (etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu) because that just opens it as a text file. There must be a way to do it but I can't find it.

[shane]

I do not know how to do what you are trying to do... but if mintmenu works for you, why don't you install mintmenu on the other distros? It is perfectly portable... it even works well in Arch Linux.

[viking777]

Thanks for the reply. The only problem with that strategy is that, for example, Pclos doesn't contain many of the Mint tools and programs so Mintmenu wouldn't be much use on it (unless I completely repopulated it), it needs to be the same menu as on the 'base' install (ie. Lxde main menu in the case of Pclos) to be useful. Same goes for Sidux and Debian although to a lesser extent as some of the programs are common in this case.

There probably just isn't a way to do what I want with this type of menu system, but thanks for trying anyway - this is yet another reason why Mint is so much better than the rest.