Disable duplicate menu entries in Gnome Shell

[pfjap.paco]

Is there a way to disable duplicate menu entries in Gnome Shell?

I've narrowed down the cause of the duplicates to the .desktop files in /var/lib/menu-xdg/applications/menu-xdg. Deleting the entire folder seemed to do the trick, but after an upgrade, the icons popped right back. Is there an alternative method of removing the duplicate menu entries? I'm afraid that if I append "NoDisplay=True" to all of the files, it will just be erased after another upgrade. Perhaps there's a way to just keep that folder from being recreated?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[karashata]

Uninstall the 'menu-xdg' package. It's not really necessary anymore and it will remove the duplicate entries permanently.

[pfjap.paco]

Hmm, ok, the only issue there is removing menu-xdg also removes the MATE session. It's not that I use the MATE session very much, but I would still like to keep it around. Would it work if I appended "OnlyShowIn=MATE;" to each file? Again, I'm just concerned that those changes will be erased in the event of an upgrade.

[karashata]

Ah, I was not aware of that...

Assuming you append them to the files in your /home/<your user name>/.config/menus folder, they shouldn't be overwritten by package updates. Appending them to the files in /etc/xdg/menus will result in them being overwritten by updates.

I'm not sure appending OnlyShowIn=MATE would help, as I believe that field is meant to specify one specific category that menu entries should show up in where the entry may have multiple categories, and not the desktop environment the entries should be used in.

Some more useful info might be here: http://developer.gnome.org/menu-spec/

Or perhaps here: http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-s ... atest.html

[pfjap.paco]

Hmm, ok, thanks for the help. I figure I'll just keep deleting menu-xdg whenever it pops up. It doesn't seem to hurt the MATE session I don't even understand why it's a dependency.

[bimsebasse]

See section 1g in the Mint 12 Tips & Tricks Guide

[aeronaut]

I just came across this duplicate menu problem. I tried using alacart to remove the duplicates, but get this, I'd uncheck a box ...wait about 1/2 second, and the checkmark would reappear!!!!! I deleted the /var/lib/menu-xdg/applications/menu-xdg directory, and that worked. Wow.

[russ553]

When unchecking items in alacarte, you need to burrow down into each and every subfolder, uncheck those items and then it will allow you to uncheck the main folder. By doing this in the Debian folder, you will eliminate the double icons.

[bimsebasse]

thanks russ553, can anyone confirm that this works? I remember struggling with it a bit, unchecked folders checked themselves, running alacarte as root didn't help much, and in the end I just deleted everything in Debian, but can't remember if I had to uncheck all subfolders first.

[awi]

These worked for me, thank you.
For the records, I'm not using MATE.

Uninstall the 'menu-xdg' package. It's not really necessary anymore and it will remove the duplicate entries permanently.

[bimsebasse]

Removing the menu-xdg package doesn't harm MATE in any way?

[bimsebasse]

Btw - not to stir up anything or sound too drama queeny - but this duplication that keeps bugging users and spawning new threads in here, I added that as a bug on mint's launchpad few weeks back and it was immediately tagged "Opinon", which means whoever maintains the launchpad bug reporting don't think this is an issue that needs fixing. Go figure.

[RichardM]

karashata wrote:
Uninstall the 'menu-xdg' package. It's not really necessary anymore and it will remove the duplicate entries permanently.

Okay so I uninstalled this along with the others Synaptic said were necessary to uninstall as well, but NO difference. I rebooted to just see if that was it, but no difference.

Can anyone tell me why?

[z06gal]

When unchecking items in alacarte, you need to burrow down into each and every subfolder, uncheck those items and then it will allow you to uncheck the main folder. By doing this in the Debian folder, you will eliminate the double icons.

This is what I did and it worked beautifully

[beachgardener]

thanks mate, had a case of the duplicate icons, installed alacarte, went through and deleted the un-needed, took about an hour. seems that there is lots of weird things happening in gnome 3

[bimsebasse]

This bug is Mint 12 specific, though, and probably has to do with MATE interfering with MGSE.

I added the bug a month ago to Mint's launchpad where it was immediately labeled "Opinion" and now it's gone altogether - so either this won't get fixed or is already fixed

[beachgardener]

thanks mate, i will be doing another install later on, see what happens, not sure but might have happened when i tried a couple different icon themes, they seemed to double up, anyway hope it is fixed

[RichardM]

By doing this in the Debian folder, you will eliminate the double icons

Okay, my Debian folder in alacarte is blank. What am I missing?
As per my post above removing the menu-xdg package didn't do a thing for me either.

Anyone?