Jul 29, 2008

Applications menu not working in Ubuntu

This was the problem faced by Sanaklp, one of my friend. He was trying to install some apps via apt-get. during the installation he was warned about for no space in root partition. Somehow the system was working fine even after all this. But once he rebooted his system, he couldnt see any sub-menu under "Applications" menu. At the moment i reached there and he asked me to resolve the problem.

I thought that some configuration associated with the menu must be wrong and I was right. I just deleted the config file at /home//.config/menus/applications.menu.

$ rm /home/<username>/.config/menus/applications.menu

What happens after you delete this file is the system assumes your menu to be same as the default. Whenever you change the menu (Right click and "Edit Menus"), the system will again generate the file which you deleted earlier.

Relogin and your system must be fine now.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I ran into a similar problem - my main menu disappeared and alacarte wouldn't start (and threw weird errors in the terminal). I deleted my applications.menu file as described above, opened alacarte again, and it was fine! Thanks for posting a fix.

The only think I can think is that I installed openoffice.org3 beta 2 by downloading their .tar.gz file and manually installing all the included .debs, and there were a few errors in the install. OOo works fine, but I suspect it might have done something weird to my menu.

Jerome Queste said...

Had the same problem: Apps menu disappeared after a problme with my disk being full.

Solution worked fine for me.
Thanks Dude

Amitava Mukherjee said...

The problem could be with read-write permissions in folders.
Open a terminal and enter "alacarte". Then in the terminal window look for error messages that says permission denied. You will then need to change the Permissions for those folders. Open another terminal and enter "gksudo nautilus". Now navigate to the offending folders, right-click and select Properties, then on the Permissions tab change the owner and the permissions to Read-write. This should work.
You may also want to rename the applications.menu file and the settings.menu file and keep them for deletion later when your menus are working.
I have noticed this problem when I partitioned the hard disk to store my user/home/ folder in a separate partition.

Technical Leadership School said...

Solution worked for me.
Cheers !!!