Debian menu with Ubuntu 12.04 and MATE desktop
I recently put together a new computer system with a fresh Xubuntu 12.04 install. Xfce is a good desktop environment but it not my preferred one; I like gnome2. Since the Gnome people have jumped the shark the only option left was the Gnome2 fork, MATE. One of the first things I tried to do was to enable the Debian menu. Unfortunately that was not a straightforward task and the only search results on the topic were for Crunchbang with Openbox. Hopefully this page being indexed will save others time.
The first bit was disabling a lot of Xfce services, but that is another story. Then I installed menus and xdg-menu as per normal and ran sudo update-menus. I was surprised when this did not enable the Debian menu. Nor was I able to enabled it via "mozo" the MATE desktop fork of "alacarte" I was familiar with from gnome2.
Instead I had to learn the Freedesktop menu format system and edit the xml files manually to enable the Debian menu. The below is a copy of my, /home/superkuh/.config/menus/mate-applications.menu showing an example of how to add in a Debian menu entry.
<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC '-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN' 'http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-1.0.dtd'> <Menu> <Name>Applications</Name> <MergeFile type="parent">/etc/xdg/menus/mate-applications.menu</MergeFile> <Menu> <Name>Development</Name> <DirectoryDir>/home/superkuh/.local/share/desktop-directories</DirectoryDir> <Include> <Filename>python2.7.desktop</Filename> </Include> <AppDir>/home/superkuh/.local/share/applications</AppDir> </Menu> <Menu> <Name>Debian</Name> <MergeFile type="child">/home/superkuh/.config/menus/debian-menu.menu</MergeFile> </Menu> </Menu>
Wine menu as well...
To get the Wine menu to show up as well edit /etc/xdg/menus/mate-applications.menu, and add <MergeDir> after <DefaultMergeDirs/>:
<DefaultMergeDirs/> <MergeDir>applications-merged</MergeDir>
Then do,
ln -s ~/.config/menus/applications-merged ~/.config/menus/mate-applications-merged
