wine menus

Tom Spear speeddymon at gmail.com
Fri Jun 22 01:43:42 CDT 2007


I actually did some testing behind .lnk functionality (unscientific
testing, that is) with wine a few months ago.  Xorg actually fully
supports Windows' .lnk files with 2 minor annoyances..

The .lnk files could theoretically be used as the links in the menus
if these 2 annoyances could be fixed (probably by Xorg, not wine)..

1) The .lnk extension shows up even in the menu

2) The icon is just a picture of a window with a white background and
a MS flag.  If that icon could be changed to, say the icon specified
inside the .lnk file, it would be perfect.

Other than that, you can double click on a .lnk file and the program
will be executed with wine (assuming BINFMT_MISC is setup properly on
your system), including whatever command line options are specified to
the program, in the lnk file.

Now with all that being said, this still deviates from Freedesktop, so
I kinda need to backtrack and say that I am not recommending that we
USE those files as the menu entries. Quite the contrary!  I think if
we can find out what license the xorg code to parse the .lnk files is
under, then we could potentially use that code to help us with a
parser, or if it is not LGPL'ed then we might be able to get the code
author's permission..

One other amendment to what I said above, because I haven't fully
checked this..  It may just be KDE that supports the lnk files, and
not Xorg.. As KDE is what I use, I don't have time to install/test
with GNOME, or others. Someone please feel free to give it a shot with
something other than KDE and post results back..

Hope that helps

Tom

P.S. While we are at it, can someone look into bug 3548 please?

On 6/22/07, Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> At the moment, wine builds fd.o menus by calling winemenubuilder and
> wineshelllink when shell32's IPersistFile_fnSave is invoked. This both
> misses menus copied directly into the menu directory without calling
> IPersistFile_fnSave, and provides no way to remove the menus when the
> app is uninstalled.
>
> Wine also keeps .lnk files in
> ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/<user>/Start Menu/ just like Windows
> does, and those .lnk files seem like a much better representation of
> the menus that should appear on the system, because they are also
> deleted when an app is uninstalled.
>
> Is it possible to add a new utility, or patch an existing utility like
> wineboot, to synchronize between wine's .lnk files in the windows
> directory and the fd.o menus, instead of using
> winemenubuilder/wineshelllink? Would a patch that does that be okay?
>
> Thank you
> Damjan
>
>
>


-- 
Thanks

Tom



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