User:Tsu2/LXDE-Main Menu

LXDE Main Menu on openSUSE (12.3, 13.1 and later)

Although LXDE on openSUSE is for the most part a great Desktop, the main LXDE project does not include a GUI tool for managing its Main Menu and the outside project LXMED is broken on SUSE/openSUSE.

Beware! Trying to use LXMED on openSUSE will corrupt the Main Menu!

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But, not to worry! Here are the following simple steps to modify and create menu entries, perhaps some enterprising person would be interested to spend the day or so to turn this into a GUI utility, but for now has to be done manually(Anyone interested in trying to do this, just message me and I'll lend you my thoughts and help with any issues you run into).

The following instructions are based on, but in a few places simplify what is described at
http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Main_Menu

Fundamentals:

The location of all LXDE Main Menu items

usr/share/applications/

Preparation:

1. Install your application

It can be of any type whether installed from repository or from source or a simple script. The example application here is JDownloader which I've found very reliable and full featured for downloading videos from the Internet. Because it's a Java app, installing and running requires a JRE, today I'm using openjdk-1.7. Regardless what type of app you wish to add to the Main Menu, first be certain the app can be launched without problem. So, in the case of JDownloader, when the install script finishes, the path is displayed to a recommended executable (which generally isn't right and needed to be modified).

2. Decide which Category in the Main Menu

Open your existing Main Menu and locate an app which is already listed in the Category you wish to create your new entry. In my example JDownloader, it's an Internet app so one app I've found in the "Internet" category is Empathy, so for comparison I opened the config file "empathy.desktop" to inspect its contents. Note that once the config for that app is opened however, I find that the Category is "Network" (not something like Internet). If no Category is specified for the new Menu Item you will make, it will automatically be placed in "Other"

Create!

3. Create a new file in the appropriate location

the following can be executed from a root console (Note for anyone running JDownloader how I modified the executable path to the binary in the Exec line below. Replace "user" with your Username)(And for those very new to Linux, "usr" is correct and is not the same as "user")

vi /usr/share/applications/jdownloader.desktop

Within the new config file, create entries based on the following JDownloader example

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=java -jar -Xmx512m /home/user/.jd/JDownloader.jar
Icon=/home/user/.jd/jd/img/logo/icon.ico
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=JDownloader
GenericName=JDownloader
StartupNotify=false
Categories=Network

Now that the new menu item's config file is in place, reload the lxde panels with the following command

lxpanelctl restart

If all was configured properly, you should now see your new item in the Category you specified!

Additional information which may be important to some

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LXDE
- Explains how to use alternative file locations
- Describes "NoDisplay=true/false" option
- Describes how to bulk migrate to another machine (or LXDE Desktop)
- Warns about KDE applications, but I strongly suspect that any supported KDE applications will most likely be installed from the OSS or KDE repos which should manage menu item entries automatically.