Gnome application help does not work in Mint 13 XFCE

[Elderwuss]

In Mint 13 XFCE, in Gnome applications, when Contents inside the Help Menu is selected, Yelp is supposed to be started with the specific help content for that specific Gnome app. That does not happen; instead Firefox is started, pointed to http://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php, which contains no application specific help. This all works correctly in LMDE XFCE and XUbuntu 12.04. Is this a known problem that is being worked on?

[iveand]

It seems the Mint team did this intentionally because "yelp" doesn't contain Cinnamon help, but rather Gnome-Shell help (or in Ubuntu's case, Unity help). But I personally think that the help is very essential for application help, so I reverted this hack by the Mint team. Here is how to do it:

sudo mv /usr/local/bin/yelp /usr/local/bin/yelp.mint

(It is this file that I think the Mint team made: since usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin in the PATH, it is called first, effectively bypassing the actual yelp program. By renaming this file, the "real" yelp is called in /usr/bin/yelp instead of this hacked shortcut to linuxmint help online).

Here is the reference from Clem's response to a comment confirming that MInt did this intentionally:

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2010

Search for "yelp" on that page and and you will find the discussion.

[Elderwuss]

Iveand, Thank you very much. I have delayed heavy use of Mint 13 Xfce until this was fixed. Clem's reply made no sense to me, in that I am running Xfce. I could care less about problems with Mate or Cinn. As I mentioned in my original post: Yelp works fine in LMDE Xfce and in Xubuntu.

[karlchen]

Hello, Elderwuss.

Clem's answer does make sense to me.
He states that the yelp help pages often assume that you are using the Gnome Shell as your Linux desktop environment. Some of the yelp help pages, those which have been modified by Canonical, tend to assume that you are using Unity as your Linux desktop environment.
In case you are using Mate, Cinnamon or Xfce as your desktop environment, it is not totally unlikely that some of the steps which you learn from the yelp help pages do not always match your actual desktop environment.
Yet, like you, I do not agree that the implemented workaround improves the situation. Sending people to the Linux Mint User Guide in all cases is not helpful in all those cases where users press <F1> for help on application specific topics. The Linux Mint User Guide does not cover any of these topics.
Therefore, I'd rather get help about the right application running in the wrong desktop environment than getting no application specific help at all.
As a consequence, I have executed these commands on my Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon

Code: Select all

cd  /usr/local/bin; sudo mv yelp yelp.mint

and I will do so on my Linux Mint 13 Xfce, too. - Thanks a lot to iveand for sharing with us the knowledge how to re-enable yelp.

Cheers,
Karl

[strict]

I wasn't even aware of this until reading about it here. I also feel that help that may only be partially specific could possibly be more helpful than nothing at all. I could always google the problem myself otherwise.

I have also run the (un)hack provided here.