GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 372861
Edit system wide menus with alacarte would be a very handy feature
Last modified: 2008-02-17 10:03:30 UTC
One system administrator would like to use alacarte to edit system-wide menus. The problem is that alacarte only permits to edit user specific menus, and it is impossible to add a new menu enty for all users on a machine with alacarte without launching it for each user, or asking each user to do it himself by following a procedure... Alacarte is a nice and very handy menu editing tool, and it would realy be much nicer to have an option for "system" menu edition (and launching this option would prompt for the root password).
That was possible in smeg, issuing "sudo smeg --root": it modified the menu globally. That's particularly important in edubuntu. I have edubuntu with ~500 users, and it's necessary to have a way to modify all the menus in a snapshot.
Yes, I think that this feauture is really needed, and could be nice that was added to the next alacarte version. Please add it. Thanks a lot :-)
*** Bug 410719 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #0) > One system administrator would like to use alacarte to edit system-wide menus. > > The problem is that alacarte only permits to edit user specific menus, and it > is impossible to add a new menu enty for all users on a machine with alacarte > without launching it for each user, or asking each user to do it himself by > following a procedure... > > Alacarte is a nice and very handy menu editing tool, and it would realy be much > nicer to have an option for "system" menu edition (and launching this option > would prompt for the root password). > This problem is a serious handicap to the system which is now, after many enhancements working very well. It is really vital that there should be an ability to provide system wide menus. Please do raise the importance of this problem.
The proper way to do this is sabayon, not interested in adding this feature to alacarte too.
I have put sabayon on my system version 2.20.1 and I cannot do anything with it, (it throws up a bug) and I was not previously aware of this module. We need a means to do system wide editing of the menu which was possible in previous versions of Mandriva. If a separate module such as sabayon should be used then clearly I would expect this to be in the Mandriva control panel. The alternative of having some root administration of alacarte was the expected way after we were used to the menu editing on the previous versions of Mandriva. The important thing is that we bring back a means of doing system wide menu editing which we had previously been used to having.
Sabayon won't do actually "system" menu editing, it will let you build a profile with certain settings (including menu layout, I believe) and then you use that as your base profile for your users. The way alacarte is designed it assumes it cannot write to files in the system menu and would take quite a bit of a redesign to change this. This is why I warn people to never run alacarte as root, it is possible it will just wipe out your entire menu as it attempts to delete things at various points to see if they are system owned or user owned.