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earthpig

Member

Registered: 2009-03-24

Posts: 30

[SOLVED] update removed menu items in lxpanel menu & in gnome-panel

when i start gnome-panel, the 'applications' drop down is empty, and 'system' no longer contains the 'administration' and 'preferences' items.

in lxpanel, the menu only shows 'run' and 'logout'.

i wanted to see if alacarte still showed things, so i ran alacarte from a terminal (which normally works)...

[chris: ~]$ alacarte
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 36, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 32, in main
    app = MainWindow(datadir, version, sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 48, in __init__
    self.editor = MenuEditor()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 36, in __init__
    self.__loadMenus()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 60, in __loadMenus
    self.settings.dom = xml.dom.minidom.parse(self.settings.path)      
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1918, in parse
    return expatbuilder.parse(file)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 924, in parse
    result = builder.parseFile(fp)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 211, in parseFile
    parser.Parse("", True)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: no element found: line 1, column 0

naturally, starting alacarte by right clicking on gnome-menu -> edit menus also does nothing.

i looked at /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Alacarte/MainWindow.py with cat, and there is nothing super-obviously wrong with the script.

also:

[chris: ~]$ ls /usr/share/applications
abiword.desktop
alacarte.desktop
aldm-gui.desktop
assistant.desktop
at-properties.desktop
avahi-discover.desktop
banshee-1-audiocd.desktop
banshee-1.desktop
banshee-1-media-player.desktop
baobab.desktop
*and so on*

so those didn't vanish.

any ideas?

Last edited by earthpig (2009-12-18 21:36:18)

earthpig

Member

Registered: 2009-03-24

Posts: 30

Re: [SOLVED] update removed menu items in lxpanel menu & in gnome-panel

so i saw this error message....

** (gnome-panel:4408): WARNING **: Error loading menu layout from "/home/chris/.config/menus/settings.menu": Error on line 1 char 1: Document was empty or contained only whitespace

the file was empty. and what do we do with broken config files in ~? why, we hide them, of course!

[chris: ~/.config/menus]$ mv settings.menu settings.menubackup

now gnome-panel works, but alacarte (menu editor) and lxpanel's menu is still busted.

now that i am getting somewhere, im gonna keep posting as i trace this down so others that may come across this same issue can benefit.

edit: renamed ~/.config/menus/lxde-applications.menu to .menubackup and restarted lxpanel, it works now.

edit2:

alacarte is giving me this...

IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/chris/.config/menus/applications.menu'

and sure enough, pcmanfm told me that the file belonged to root.

sudo pcmanfm, navigated to that file, right click -> properties -> permissions -> changed owner to chris and group to users.

alacarte works now, too.

i think im going to go through and recursively make everything in each ~ folder belong to the username it should just in case permissions got jumbled somewhere/anywhere else.

just so i know: did this happen to anyone else that updated within the last 24 hours or so?

(so i can learn if it was something *I* did, or if it was something that came with the *update*)

Last edited by earthpig (2009-12-18 21:33:11)