Customizing the Gnome menus with Gnome 2.0 in Solaris 9.

– or –
Corrections to Solaris document 817-3851 “Gnome 2.0 Desktop for the Solaris Operating
Environment Systems Administration Guide” chapter 2, “Customizing Menus”.

So you have installed Solaris 9 with Gnome 2.0 on some 150 machines and now you
would like to customize the Applications menu to list your specific applications.

Every single pathname in that chapter is wrong and is pretty useless in actually attempting
this task, though I do make the assumption through the rest of this post that you have read
it.

1. Create a central repository for your menus and menu items:

To simplify menu administration you want to have all the menu items you are going to be
adding to be located in a single directory which is shared out to all your machines. In my
world we use the following directories that are nfs mounted on all hosts:

/pkgs/gnome/applications
/pkgs/gnome/vfolders
/pkgs/gnome/pixmaps

applications holds the .desktop files that are the actual menu items
vfolders holds the .directory files that will create the submenus for you
pixmaps holds the icons that will be used next to your menu items

2. Create an initial .directory file to hold your new menu items.

For example:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Math Dept Apps
Comment=Local Dept of Mathematics Applications
Icon=/pkgs/gnome/pixmaps/gnome-calc2.png
Type=Directory

NOTE: I still haven’t gotten Icons working for the Desktop Entries this way, though they
do work for menu items