[Wine] Re: Wine and Gnome menus...

[mdevour]

vitamin wrote:
> Please be specific what didn't work? If you let Wine do everything it works in 99% cases. If you try and start "editing" something without knowing what you doing - the chances are pretty good you'll break it.


Hi vitamin, thanks for the feedback. Hopefully I'll learn something! :) 

I downloaded the free trial of a program called MagicISO (magiciso.com) so I could convert a .uif file I downloaded to an .iso. 

I ran the installer by right clicking on it and selecting "open with wine." The installer seemed to run just fine, finished, and closed. Afterwards I had a .lnk file on my desktop, and a submenu for MagicISO was added under the Wine sub-menu of Gnome's Applications menu. It contained ONLY the launcher for the Uninstaller.

After not finding any other way to go, I finally sent a copy of that launcher to the desktop, edited it to execute the program itself instead of the uninstaller and did the job I had wanted to do... Everything since has been me trying to understand how to make things work the way they're supposed to with wine and the menus.


> 
> mdevour wrote:
> > Instead, only the Uninstall applet showed up and there was no entry for the program itself.
> 
> How do you know what should be there? Did you checked under windows? Also have you verified that installation actually exited? Wine will wait until install is complete to create some icons. And sometimes installers hang.


Yes, I checked in the windows program files directory that was created, as well as (I'm going by memory now...) a directory in ~/.wine which showed that there was a launcher created for both parts of the program, but only one of them was being displayed in the menu.

As I said above, there was no sign that the installer had any problem at all. Everything exited fine as far as I could tell.



> 
> mdevour wrote:
> > It turns out that ... Alecarte, does not even display the Wine sub-menu ...
> 
> You should report this bug to creators of this program. Wine follows XDG standard when creating menu entries. If it doesn't work with your menu editor - it's not standard complaint.


Okay then, that's a lot more than I knew before. I have not yet found anything in the Wine documentation that describes this aspect of its operation... but I admit I haven't spent as much time going over every single thing as I'd need to.


> 
> mdevour wrote:
> > Installing that version tells me that the creation of nice, tidy gnome menu entries is not within the scope of the Wine project itself. Is that correct?
> 
> You probably missunderstood that part. Wine can and does create correct menu and desktop entries for every installed program. In the same way they would appear on windows. And it works in most cases.


Hmmm... No doubt on the "misunderstood" part! There's been a lot of that going on over here! [Laughing] 

All I know is that once I'd deleted every sign of my previous Wine installs by marking all the installed files for removal and purge in Synaptic, then deleting the .wine directory and the wine bits scattered through .local and, (I think) .config... I had no Wine items left in any of Gnome's menus and nothing installed that I could see in Synaptic.

Then I added the WineHQ repository to my sources list, installed wine, and ran winecfg from a command line. It created the usual disk image and directories and I could run the file manager from Nautilus' right click menu. I also reinstalled MagicISO, and that all seemed to work, too...

However, this time, no sign of anything Wine related appeared in the Gnome menu system, so I assumed that that was the normal state of affairs for a vanilla wine install.

So where and how am I supposed to get wine to create its menu items, and where should I look for the documentation for this? Can I assume that because it didn't work automatically with what I've done so far that my system is mucked up, or is there something more I'm supposed to do before it will?


> However vanilla Wine does not create any entries for itself (ex: winecfg, notepad, winefile, etc).
> 
> Also note that Wine does not remove menu/desktop entries on program uninstall. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10277
  

Okay, now that is consistent with all the behavior I've seen so far with this most recent (v1.1.1) install.  [Laughing]

I've been as specific as I can from memory. I hope it'll give you some idea what I've been doing wrong or what might be broken here.

Thanks,

Mike D.