[Wine] Wine and Gnome menus...

[mdevour]

Hi all,

I've spent several days tinkering with Wine and have uncovered what seems to be a mess: Menus in Gnome for Wine applications...

I'm running Debian 4.0 (Etch) with a few backports, and Gnome 2.14.3.

I've progressed from the version of Wine that's in the Etch repositories, 0.9.25-2.1, through the one in backports, 1.0-rc1-1, to the current 1.1.1 from the WineHQ repositories. All were installed with either apt-get or Synaptic.

There seems to be some mechanism in place in the Debian implementation of Wine under Gnome that attempts to create menu entries for the Wine configuration and Uninstall programs and any installed Wine applications in the main Gnome Applications menu. I say "attempts" because it's buggy as heck.

I ran the installer for a program, MagicISO, which created a directory in Program Files containing about 4 different things, at least two of which should have had menu entries. Instead, only the Uninstall applet showed up and there was no entry for the program itself.

No problem! I can just make a new menu entry myself, right? NOPE!!  [Rolling Eyes] 

It turns out that the very nice menu editor for the Gnome menus, a program called Alecarte, does not even display the Wine sub-menu that was created and updated during the installation of wine and subsequent applications.

After several days of experimenting, the only thing I've managed to do is to break things further. If you Google 'gnome menus wine' you'll see many reports of broken, missing, un-editable or unremovable Gnome menus in Debian and the various Ubuntus, with no easy or reliable answer, and many partial, inconsistent, and inevitably primitive approaches being suggested.

As of now, I think I have finally succeeded in completely uninstalling and purging the old version of Wine and all its configuration and data files, and doing a fresh install of the current beta release from WineHQ. 

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?

If so, then do you have any suggestions or maybe a broader perspective on why this situation exists and what, if anything, might be happening and where I can learn more?

Or if I'm missing something obvious, please clue me in!  [Laughing] It won't be the last time I'm proven clueless with this Linux thing!

Be well,

Mike D.