[PLUG] Resolved: Program installed but not showing up in Ubuntu MATE 18.04 menu

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 11:28:35 -0700
Dick Steffens <dick at dicksteffens.com> dijo:

>On 07/31/2018 11:10 AM, Dick Steffens wrote:
>> I just downloaded and installed 
>> virtualbox-5.2_5.2.16-123759~Ubuntu~bionic_amd64.deb using the GDebi 
>> Package Installer on my Ubuntu MATE 18.04 machine. The package 
>> installer indicates that the program was installed, but there's no 
>> entry for it in the Ubuntu MATE menu. A search in that menu for 
>> VirtualBoxVM returns empty. How do I find out where it was
>> installed? And, how do I get it into the menu? I suppose I don't
>> really need it in the menu if I can put a launch icon in the panel.
>>  
>
>One of the changes in Ubuntu MATE 18.04 is that the entries in the
>menu bar were reduced to a single Menu. I found a video that pointed
>out how to use MATE Tweak to return to the Traditional panel layout,
>which has Applications, Places, and System. Once I did that I was able
>to find VirtualBox in the Applications > System Tools menu. Why it
>wasn't in the menu of the "Familiar" layout, I don't know. (Familiar
>is the name of the default panel layout.)

Menu items are created by .desktop files, one of each program. These
are just plain text files and live in ~/.local/share/applications or
in /usr/share/applications. The former take precedence over the latter,
and if an item appears in both locations it will appear in the menus
only once. However, if you have two files pointing to the same program
but with different filenames, the program will appear twice. Here is an
example of a simple (minimal) .desktop file from my computer, to which
I added some explanatory notes:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=HDHomeRun Config
	#How it will appear in the menu
Comment=A GUI for configuration of HDHomeRun devices
	#Mouse-over popup text
GenericName=HDHomeRun Config
	#An alternate name needed by some desktop environments
Exec=hdhomerun_config_gui
	#How you would launch it from the command line
Type=Application
	# Or Link, or several other possibilities
Icon=hdhr
	# If the display uses icons instead of or in addition to text
Categories=GNOME;Multimedia-Players;Audio;Video;
	# Complicated!

You can edit any of the above to suit yourself, or create a whole brand
new .desktop file if you like. 

Re Categories: There is a text file listing all the categories. On my
Xfce computers it is ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications-menu. The syntax
is kind of confusing, but by looking at existing entries you can figure
out how to add or delete a category. If the category is not in the list
it will not appear in your menus, and anything in the Categories= line
of a .desktop file will be ignored.

Any changes you make, whether changes to the categories or changes
to .desktop files, sometimes appear immediately, but sometimes not
before refreshing the panel.

On Mate desktops the names/locations of things will be different, but
the .desktop file will still be the base that the menu is based on.
This is because the .desktop file is created when the program is
installed, so the installer (dpkg or apt/aptitude) will create it with
the instructions in the package. 

I recently spent more than a full day fixing my menus to be the way I
want them and figuring out how to do it.