Reset fluxbox menu

[loetje]

Hi,

I did a fresh install of LM fluxbox 9. During install I pointed it to the /home partition I was also using with my LM 6 Fluxbox (which still sits on a seperate partition). This works fine except for teh fact that apparantly all the programs I had installed in my old LM6 are stored on the home drive and the fluxbox menu refers to them. Offcourse it is impossible tot start these programs because a lot of them don't exist on the LM9 partition. Is there any way I can reset the fluxbox menu to the default menu that is also shown on the live cd? The only thing I can start now is my web browser and file manager, all other important stuff (terminal, mintinstall etc) doesn't start because the menu links to the wrong programs...

Thanks

[viking777]

I am not sure if I am reading this right, but if you 'reset' the menus so they point to the programs on the mint9 install then the programs on the mint6 install won't work (one of the downsides of a separate /home partition I guess, but peculiar to Fluxbox since very few DE's or WM's use the /home folder to locate their menu files). I guess you would have to have one menu with entries for both the Mint6 and Mint9 programs, but it might look a bit crowded !

Anyway, if you decide to do this then you need to know the following. The main menu is in the file ~/.fluxbox/menu which is a plain text file editable in any text editor, whilst the sub menus are in ~/.mint-fm2/submenus again plain text and easily editable. So you could manually add the Mint9 entries to the Mint6 menus or alternatively you could extract those two files from the live cd copy them to your home partition and then add the Mint6 entries to them.

Lastly you could always forget about Mint 6 altogether and have Mint 9 and something newer on the old Mint 6 partition - that is what I would do!

[loetje]

Thanks! You got it right! I'm considering your advice, but for now I'll stick with 'resetting' the menu.
The downside to overwriting my old installation is that I loose al lot of programs that I installed and aliases and scripts that I saved. Keeping my old partition allows me to peek inside my old root every now and then when Im missing certain programs.
Is there an easy way to migrate all these personal settings and programs to a new install?

[viking777]

Thanks! You got it right! I'm considering your advice, but for now I'll stick with 'resetting' the menu.
The downside to overwriting my old installation is that I loose al lot of programs that I installed and aliases and scripts that I saved. Keeping my old partition allows me to peek inside my old root every now and then when Im missing certain programs.
Is there an easy way to migrate all these personal settings and programs to a new install?

An easy way? I can't think of one. Your separate /home partition should mean that anything in there is automatically used by the new install (which is part of your original problem). Programs? Well that depends on how you installed them. If they are all .deb packages, and if you haven't run anything like 'apt-cache clean' then everything you have installed should have its packages saved in /var/cache/apt/archives, so save that file to a usbkey then copy it back to the same location on the new install (this doesn't install the programs it just saves you from having to download them all again). If you are talking about source programs that you have compiled then there is no way that I know of to transfer those. As for scripts well, if you installed them I guess you must know where they are, so again copy and paste. Aliases? I just don't know how to deal with those.

[jeffreyC]

If you did clean out the cache you could use dpkg-repack to get a.deb of the program but how compatible it would be with a much newer version ?
This only works on .debs which were installed, if you bypassed the package management you will need to find the source and make it again.

[loetje]

thanks all. I'm also gonna try mint backup, that seems to enable backing up all the installed programs

[viking777]

thanks all. I'm also gonna try mint backup, that seems to enable backing up all the installed programs

Unless it has changed since I looked at it mintbackup doesn't back up any programs, it just produces a script which will redownload and reinstall what you choose. In other words it just produces a list of installed programs - nothing more.

[jeffreyC]

Switched to CrunchBang
See you on the CrunchBang forum
Be careful about mixing Debian stable with Debian unstable