SuSE’s new GNOME menu in my desktop overlay
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 3:55 PM, Sun 23 Jul 06
Filed under: Gentoo
4 Comments
I’ve put a copy of Nathan Caldwell’s ebuild for slab into my developer overlay. This is only a temporary arrangement, until someone more interested in desktops (I just use them to access servers) steps up and takes ownership. It’s just that, like many folk, I’ve been very impressed with the demos of slab in particular, and SuSE’s latest desktop release in general, and I wanted to have a play myself 
As a replacement menu, it works great for me. It works so well, I’ve removed the default GNOME menu from the panel. Having my favourite apps right there when I click is something I find much more usable, and if you want to go hunting for a rarely-used app, the interface feels very natural.
But, in its current form, there are a few problems:
- The ‘Recently Used Apps’ panel is always blank.
- The ‘Control Center’ only shows two options. There is work going on to sort this out, by providing an ebuild for SuSE’s gcontrol app, but this isn’t ready for use yet.
- The ‘Install Software’ button does nothing. Presumably it’s trying to launch SuSE’s package manager. It should be simple enough to patch it to launch (say) PortHole instead.
I guess what someone really needs to do is to pop a copy of SuSE’s desktop in a VMWare machine, so that they can compare the experience against what we have for Gentoo atm, and fix things to match.
Any volunteers?
4 Comments
July 23rd, 2006 at 4:39 pm
SuSE Gnome menu is very nice, even if it takes some getting used to.
It would be great if gentopia picked up on this. I’m not sure what’s going on there anymore but in the end a meta ebuild that would have all the components including this menu system, the best portage frontend and whatever configuration tools the GUI people use.
July 23rd, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I agree … that would be great. It really needs someone who knows Gnome well enough to pick this up and make that happen.
July 25th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Your problems are mostly low hanging fruits
Recently used apps is blank cause upstream gnome does not have this functionality, though there are patches for gnome-panel and gnome-desktop in cvs to solve this:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/slab/patch/
The control center problem is even easier, the problem here is, that on desktop file has been renamed in 2.14 (SLED still uses 2.12.3). A simple patch solves that
— control-center/src/control-center.c
+++ control-center/src/control-center.c
@@ -140,7 +140,7 @@
}
AppShellData *app_data =
- appshelldata_new (”preferences.menu”, NULL,
+ appshelldata_new (”settings.menu”, NULL,
CONTROL_CENTER_PREFIX,
GTK_ICON_SIZE_DIALOG);
generate_categories (app_data);
About the Install Software button: You can replace the call it does in the gconf-settings for slab, just take a look at the gconf-settings in desktop/gnome/applications/main-menu. There you can also remove all the stuff you don’t want to use (for instance the recently used apps, etc)
July 26th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Suka - cool, thanks for explaining that. I’ll update the ebuild in my overlay with that simple patch
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