kcontrol empty [solved-ish]

shimage · n00b Joined: 18 Jul 2003 Posts: 48

I'm using Xfce, so I'm not sure if the menus are empty too or not, but both kcontrol and kcmshell are empty. I can't login as root (since it's disabled, and I'm using kdm, so I don't know how to change it at the moment), but I made a new user and it's empty for that one too. I reinstalled both kdebase-data and kcontrol, but neither made a difference. I looked at

orionbelt · Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 2:43 pm Post subject:

I am having the exact same problem, and i am also running XFCE. I am not sure if it started after my recent upgrade to XFCE 4.4, though.

Here's another posting with a similar problem:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-529817-highlight-xkdebasegroup.html?sid=c9984cae2c54dc32fc87d62faf8c4c95

but it did not solve my problem: My kdebase-data was there, and even after reinstalling it, it didn't help.

Then there's this posting:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-456431-highlight-xkdebasegroup.html?sid=c9984cae2c54dc32fc87d62faf8c4c95

and it appears that the problem may be caused by a missing ~/.config/menus/ directory (mine was indeed missing). This would be consistent with the XFCE upgrade, if XFCE decides to delete ~/.config/menus... So i installed and ran "kmenuedit", and i confirmed that it created ~/.config/menus/ with a file named applications-kmenuedit.menu inside. Alas, kcontrol still comes up empty

It's actually not just kcontrol: I have korganizer running in the taskbar. Normally, left-clicking on it would pop up a window with my calendar of events. Now this has stopped working. Ditto with kxkb, the KDE keyboard switcher: left-clicking used to bring up the properties editor but not any more. So it's a general problem.

shimage · n00b Joined: 18 Jul 2003 Posts: 48

Thanks for the reply. I don't have a .config/menus directory either; I am getting the impression that, were I able to start KDE it would fix itself, but since I don't have startkde installed at the moment, that will have to wait.

shimage · n00b Joined: 18 Jul 2003 Posts: 48

So starting in KDE didn't fix things for me (wishful thinking, I guess). It turns out that my KDE menu is not empty, somehow. All of the little applets that normally appear under kcontrol are listed individually in the "unfiled" section of the menu. This behavior seems very strange to me, and I'm not really sure why this is. I noticed that my menus files (/usr/kde/3.5/share/desktop-directories/*) don't specify their BaseGroup, so maybe that's the problem. I'm going to see if kmenuedit will help with all of this.

deface · Apprentice Joined: 17 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

I played with this one, and could reproduce the errors; so i booted into kde 3.5, and noticed it had my xfce4 menu, not the kde menu. ran a revdep-rebuild; and everything seems to be okay. I had broken a few files, but nothing pertaining to kde.

When I ran kcontrol from terminal within xfce, i only had a network icon, and nothing more. i verified i had the ~/.config/menu/* which was the xml for kde's menu. I then booted into a kde session; only to find i had the xfce menu, rather than the kde menu ( very odd ) - revdep-rebuild & logged out & back in, and suddenly my menu was back. logged back into xfce, and kcontrol opened & gave me the proper menu. Not sure, may we need to do a version diff. I am ~x86 on all my pkgs.

orionbelt · Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 8:21 pm Post subject:

deface: I forgot to mention that i had also run revdep-rebuild and everything did seem OK to me as well. And, kcontrol only shows the "Network" icon for me as well, with nothing inside when i click on it.

I'm running an amd64, so it doesn't seem to be architecture-related.

I do not have startkde installed, so i cannot reproduce your experience. Nor do i feel like installing a full KDE environment to fix this (*). But what you're describing sounds like a bug to me, though i'm not sure if it's a Gentoo bug, an XFCE bug or a KDE bug... But you may want to file a bug report starting with Gentoo, since you've had the most complete experience of the three of us here...

(*) It's not urgent, really, since thanks to this experience i got myself rid of konsole and kxkb (replacing them with XFCE's Terminal and xkb plugin + some xorg.conf hacks) and the few other standalone KDE apps that i still use seem to run fine despite this problem

shimage · n00b Joined: 18 Jul 2003 Posts: 48

I have my kcontrol menu back (oddly enough, my KDE menus were always there, albeit in a somewhat broken state). In the end, what fixed it for me was copying the contents of /usr/kde/3.5/etc/xdg/menus to .config/menus. I had messed around with various .desktop and .directory files trying to fix things, but I guess I screwed it up enough that the above fix didn't work until I re-emerged both kcontrol and kdebase-data. Now everything seems to be peachy-keen. I'm not sure why I need to have that stuff there (that is, I'm not sure why it doesn't take its defaults from /usr/kde/3.5/etc/xdg/menus), but I'm not going to complain at this point.

quasifugu · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2007 Posts: 1

I have had exactly the same problem. Xfce 4.4 recent install and a very minimal kde install in order to run kcontrol. Opening kcontrol gave the message

orionbelt · Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:56 pm Post subject:

Many thanks, quasifugu, i just tried what you suggested and it worked for me as well!

mimosinnet · Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 11:02 am Post subject:

I had the same problem and tread was useful.

I am using windowmaker, had a basic kde install and I had just installed basic gnome.

Basically, I renamed ~/.config/menus (instead of deleting it) and run kmenuedit. Then, I looked at my old ~/.config/menus and I discovered it had been replaced from another previous install I had on a different hard disk.

Thanks to all for the posts!