Debian/Applications menu not showing in Openbox [SOLVED]

[evilestmark]

Dunno if anyone can give me any pointers here, I've been looking for a while to try to figure this out but haven't found a simple answer or solution.

I use Openbox with the default openbox menu system. For some reason even though the link for the Debian menu (which is supposed to be autogenerated with all the applications on the system) is in the menu configuration file (I edit it with ObMenu), it doesn't appear when I right click on the desktop. The rest of the menu is unaffected so it seems that the Link is faulty, the file doesn't exist, or can't be found.

When I looked at my openbox configuration rc file where the Debian menu is supposed to be defined I can't determine if it is in the right place or not. A search in the file shows the file name under the keybindings:

<keybind key="A-space">
<action name="ShowMenu">
<menu>client-menu
<file>/var/lib/openbox/debian-menu.xml</file>
</menu>

But it doesn't appear anywhere else.

I see the pieces of the answer to this problem throughout Crunchbang and Openbox forums and wiki's but for the life of me I can't put them together.

[evilestmark]

Dope.

Solved it. Interestingly incredible feelings of stupidity only happen AFTER I've figured something out

I was missing this part of the openbox configuration rc file.

Add one of these lines to your ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml between the <menu> and </menu> tags, before the entry <file>menu.xml</file> tags:
<file>/var/lib/openbox/debian-menu.xml</file>
<file>debian-menu.xml</file>
The second line allows you to copy the debian-menu.xml file from /var/lib/openbox to your local ~/.config/openbox, where it becomes static (command update-menus will not affect it). You can then edit it by hand and your changes will be permanent.
That's all you should have to do, though it's a good idea to run update-menus as root every now and then if you don't have a cron job assigned. It refreshes the list of currently installed apps.
Then choose reconfigure on your root menu and you should get a Debian submenu within the root menu.