edubuntu-menu-editor

[Nick Fenger]

Kees,

I worked with one of my seniors last year on this.  It took us a long time
to dig through the gnome documentation to figure this out. Below is what we
came up with, tested on jaunty and we have successfully implemented this in
lucid. I have not checked out the edubuntu-menu-editor yet but if it works
it will save us from this tedious manual process.

Custom Gnome Menus
Overview:

Basically you are going to create your own menu directory structure that
mirrors the system's with a custom menus file in /opt/tcs/menu/tcs.menu (tcs
is short for our school's name trillium charter school) /opt/tcs/ is where
we put all of our customizations. Also in /opt/tcs you have folders for
.desktop and .directory files. You will then reference this custom menu set
by adding a line to the system menu file here:
/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu.
Your new menu items will effectively merge with the system menu items while
allowing you to easily move your menu to a new system or fat client chroot.
 Here is what to do:
*
*
*/opt/tcs/menus you have 2 directories and 1 file*
*applications and desktop-directories  and the tcs.menu file (see contents
below)
place all .desktop files in the applications directory and all .directory
files in desktop-directories I suppose you could give permissions to these
files to your 'student' group so they would only show up for students
although we have not done this.

*
*Examples of .desktop files are found in /usr/share/applications
Examples of .directory files are found in /usr/share/desktop-directories*
*You can copy an existing menu structure from the system, customize it for
your needs.*
*
*
Next: create* **/opt/tcs/menus/*tcs.menu as below with /opt/tcs/menus/
replaced with your custom menu location:

<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 0.8//EN"

"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/menu-0.8.dtd">

<Menu>

<!-- Set Location For TCS menus -->

<DirectoryDir>/opt/tcs/menus/desktop-directories</DirectoryDir>

<AppDir>/opt/tcs/menus/applications</AppDir>

 <!-- Main Menu Level -->

<Name>Trillium</Name>

<Include>

 <Category>tcs-main</Category>

</Include>

<!-- Development Tools -->

 <Menu>

   <Name>Development</Name>

    <Menu>

     <Name>alan</Name>

     <Directory>tcs-alan.directory</Directory>

     <Include>

      <Category>tcs-alan</Category>

     </Include>

    </Menu>

   <Menu>

     <Name>html</Name>

     <Directory>tcs-html.directory</Directory>

     <Include>

      <Category>tcs-html</Category>

     </Include>

    </Menu>

   <Menu>

     <Name>Scratch</Name>

     <Directory>tcs-scratch.directory</Directory>

     <Include>

      <Category>scratch</Category>

     </Include>

    </Menu>

   </Menu> <!-- End Development Tools -->

</Menu> <!-- End Main Menu Level -->


Lastly*,* reference tcs.menu (the file above) in the system applications
menu:

Make the addition below in:
 /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu

Add this line:
<MergeFile type="path">/opt/tcs/menus/tcs.menu</MergeFile>
After the <Directory> Entry as shown below..
...
<Menu>
  <Name>Applications</Name>
  <Directory>X-GNOME-Menu-Applications.directory</Directory>
  <MergeFile type="path">/opt/tcs/menus/tcs.menu</MergeFile>

Works!

-Nick (and my recent graduate Keaton)

Nick Fenger
-Information Technology

Trillium Charter School
http://www.trilliumcharterschool.org
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