Of Start Menu, Shortcuts and broken functions...

[Robert van Herk]

Subhobroto Sinha wrote:

>But as I see it, this task is REALLY easy.
>Once we resolve the Windows shorcut files,figuring out
>how to implement the resolved menu entries for
>respective Desktop environments is dependent on the
>Desktop environment themselves, and people wanting to
>implement the 'Start Menu' on that environment.
>Windows maintains it's 'Start Menu' under
>'%ROOTDIR%\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Start Menu'
>(yeah I am talking >=NT,Win2k. For 9x, it will be
>probably 'C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu'), and this folder
>contains LOADS of shortcut (.lnk) files.
>So if we can just recurse through this folder and read
>out the .lnk files into compatible menu/desktop
>entries of the corresponding Desktop environment
>(KDE,GNOME...), we have a working, synchronized 'Start
>Menu'.
>  
>
There are a few things though:

 From discussions with others from this list, I understand that you 
should not just want to list the entries in the start menu folder, but 
also other things (control panel, etc).

There should be a dll file (shell32.dll?) that can be queried to provide 
this information.

What I am currently working on is a client on Linux and a server in 
Windows (Wine). The server should notify the client when new entries 
appear, and the client uses the server to get all the needed information 
for the start menu.

I am about half way for the first client, that will run on KDE.

Didn't touch the server yet, seems harder to build. Also didn't think 
really hard on the communication between the server and the client. 
Pipes won't probably be a good idea, because you want bidirectional 
communication.

Anyhow, the first client is set up using QT. I am not shure whether this 
is general enough, so please tell me if this is not wise to do, for 
example if it won't be compatible with Gnome. If everything is QT 
compatible, only the very frontend of the client will have to be 
reprogrammed for the different desktop environments. That means that 
most classes could be recycled from the KDE version.

Grtz,
Robert