Re: Menu mess [solved]

[vinoman]

I made the mistake the other day installing Wine and playonlinux, to install iTunes. what a mistake. Wine has never worked well and I won't use it again. Anyway, now I've installed alacart to edit the menu and remove all the garbage entries from Wine and after removing all the bad entries I still have many listed under Other on the Cinnamon menu. Can you remove these? Or are they there until I install Mint 13 in May?

[bimsebasse]

alacarte doesn't work properly with Cinnamon but it has been forked for the newest development version of Cinnamon so the functionality you're looking for is probably available by next stable update.

[vinoman]

OK, just updated to Cinnamon 1.4 and rebooted. when I go to Menu edit (alacart) none of the itunes and quicktime icons are even listed anymore even thought when I select Other from the Menu I see a whole list of things like itunes, bonjour, quicktime, wine. I thought when I uninstalled playonlinux and wine they would go away. I guess not.

Is there any way to get rid of these entries?

[grizzler]

The freedesktop.org menu system maintained through Alacarte can be quite a handful if you want it to behave. And then I'm not even mentioning how certain developers screwed their users over with the current implementation in Gnome3, totally ignoring certain parts of the standard because that's the way they want it to be (who cares about following official specifications anyway...).

In the menu system nothing is ever really deleted - it just gets marked as deleted (there's a reason for this which actually makes sense, but I won't go into that now). If you want to get rid of annoying left overs, you have to manually remove the corresponding .desktop files from /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications or one of their subdirectories.

I don't know about PlayOnLinux, but Wine installs its .desktop files only in the user's directory (i.e. a subdirectory of ~/.local/share/applications). The last time I installed Wine, they ended up in ~/.local/share/applications/wine. Removing that entire subdirectory should do the trick. You may also want to remove any files with names starting with wine- from ~/.config/menus/applications-merged and ~/.local/share/desktop-directories.

Be careful not to remove too much! It's very easy to mess up your entire menu by deleting the wrong thing or making a mistake while manually editing the main menu files in ~/.config/menus.

Edit: another word of caution. My suggestion is based on the normal implementation of the menu standard that the Gnome desktop used to have. I have no idea how much Cinnemon deviates from that.

Edit 2: corrected typos.

[vinoman]

I don't have a /local/share/applications folder.

I can't find a Wine folder since I removed it with apt-get remove wine.

[viking777]

I don't have a /local/share/applications folder.

I think you will find it is a typo and should be dot local ie ~/.local/share/applications (ie show hidden files/folders in your file manager).

[vinoman]

I don't have a /local/share/applications folder.

I think you will find it is a typo and should be dot local ie ~/.local/share/applications (ie show hidden files/folders in your file manager).

after showing hidden files, I still don't have a /.local folder. Where sould it be?

The fact that alacart doesn't work very well, I'll just ignore the listings since they don't connect to anything.

[grizzler]

Sorry, I assumed someone with over 400 postings would know what the tilde (~) stood for in filenames (your home directory). My mistake.

Look at your home directory. I.e. /home/username. There you will find the .local folder (i.e. /home/username/.local).

[vinoman]

Sorry, I assumed someone with over 400 postings would know what the tilde (~) stood for in filenames (your home directory). My mistake.

Look at your home directory. I.e. /home/username. There you will find the .local folder (i.e. /home/username/.local).

I forgot what the tilda was for, thanks for reminding me. I deleted the wine folder and wine.extension.desktop files. Now the Other listing is gone and so it all the rest. Thanks.

[JigglyPuff]

The freedesktop.org menu system maintained through Alacarte can be quite a handful if you want it to behave. And then I'm not even mentioning how certain developers screwed their users over with the current implementation in Gnome3, totally ignoring certain parts of the standard because that's the way they want it to be (who cares about following official specifications anyway...).

In the menu system nothing is ever really deleted - it just gets marked as deleted (there's a reason for this which actually makes sense, but I won't go into that now). If you want to get rid of annoying left overs, you have to manually remove the corresponding .desktop files from /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications or one of their subdirectories.

I don't know about PlayOnLinux, but Wine installs its .desktop files only in the user's directory (i.e. a subdirectory of ~/.local/share/applications). The last time I installed Wine, they ended up in ~/.local/share/applications/wine. Removing that entire subdirectory should do the trick. You may also want to remove any files with names starting with wine- from ~/.config/menus/applications-merged and ~/.local/share/desktop-directories.

Be careful not to remove too much! It's very easy to mess up your entire menu by deleting the wrong thing or making a mistake while manually editing the main menu files in ~/.config/menus.

Edit: another word of caution. My suggestion is based on the normal implementation of the menu standard that the Gnome desktop used to have. I have no idea how much Cinnemon deviates from that.

Edit 2: corrected typos.

Thank you very much for this helpful post.

It immediately solved my similar problem after foolishly installing and then "removing" Wine and MS Office.

[vistad]

grizzler, thanks a million for your Heaven-sent advice on how to clean my system of all that MS garbage!!!!!!