[desktop-discuss] Missing applications from menu on nv_41

[Dave Miner]

Laszlo (Laca) Peter wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 11:21 -0400, Dave Miner wrote:
>> Laszlo (Laca) Peter wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 18:06 -0400, Dave Miner wrote:
>>>> I have an installation[1] of nv_41 which, when logged in as root, 
>>>> contains no applications on the main launch menu; by this I mean that 
>>>> the "All Applications" sub-menu is empty, and the top-level entries for 
>>>> web browser et al are missing.  Any suggestions on where to start in 
>>>> figuring out why this is the case?
>>>>
>>>> Dave
>>>>
>>>> [1] This isn't a standard installation, it's a prototype for the Live 
>>>> Media project, thus I'm assuming the problem is in the construction 
>>>> process I'm using since my standard installs of nv_41 do not exhibit 
>>>> this behavior.
>>> I suspect this is because some postinstall stuff that normally gets
>>> executed at first reboot never gets executed.  In build 41, these
>>> commands are:
>>>   /usr/bin/update-desktop-database
>>>   /usr/bin/update-mime-database
>>>   ls -d /usr/share/icons/* | xargs -l1 /usr/bin/gtk-update-icon-cache
>>>
>>> How exactly do you install the pkgs?
>>>
>> They're pkgadd'ed into an area just as they would be for a normal 
>> installation, but there is a great deal of post-processing to turn that 
>> into a bootable DVD, so anything that's done by a normal pkgadd is there 
>> to start with.  What executes the above commands on the first reboot?
> 
> So they are pkgadd'ed with an alternate root (-R), right?
> In case of alternate root installations, a postinstall script called
> postrun saves these commands in /var/spool and a transient smf
> service runs /usr/lib/postrun-runq which executes the saved commands.
> 
> You probably need to run postrun-runq as part of the postprocessing,
> however, it is assumed that the alternate root where you installed
> the pkgs is the real / when you run postrun-runq.  If that's not
> possible, you can probably chroot to the alternate root.
> 

Thanks for your help to this point, Laca.  Unfortunately, I'm still not 
quite there.  The chroot'ed run of postrun-runq seems to generate a 
correct /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache (as I can copy it to an 
installed system and get a launch menu populated with all the 
applications just like I normally would), but when I run the Live DVD I 
still get nothing in the Applications, Preferences, or Administration 
sub-menus, as well as none of the Firefox/Staroffice/Thunderbird entries 
on the top level.  So I'm guessing there's some piece of Gnome 
infrastructure that's not being started that needs to be.  I'll probably 
resort to looking at process lists and stuff, but any clues that can be 
dispensed would be helpful.

Dave

Dave