Problem editing kmenu [solved]

[olembe]

I have a few installed programs showing up under lost-and-found in my K menu and I'm trying to move them to other categories.

If I right-click on the K menu to access the editor I can move programs from one group to another but when I click 'save' I get a pop-up with the message:

Menu changes could not be saved because of the following problem:
Could not write to /home/ian/.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu

If I try to look in this location in terminal I can't even cd into the ~/.config/menus folder: I get the message 'permission denied'.

I thought I might be able to get round all this by running kmenuedit from the command line using 'kdesudo kmenuedit'. kmenuedit appears (looking slightly different in appearance, for some reason) but there are two issues. First, although my K menu has 4 programs under lost-and-found, only one shows up when I load kmenuedit this way. Second, I can move this one program and save the configuration, but this doesn't actually change my K menu!

I'm getting very puzzled - any ideas anyone?

[lmilano]

Re: Problem editing kmenu

Maybe:

sudo chmod -R u+w /home/ian/.config/menus

I maybe off by a little bit, do "[alt][F2]man:chmod" to learn more, or just see the manpage online:
http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/chmod/

[olembe]

Re: Problem editing kmenu

Thanks for the speedy reply. I tried that and it didn't work. I notice now the ~/.config/menus directory is owned by root. I presume that's the root of the problem. Is there a danger if I change to superuser and change the ownership of this directory. And why's it owned by root anyway? That seems strange...

[dibl]

Re: Problem editing kmenu

I'm getting very puzzled - any ideas anyone?

Yes -- this is the kind of thing that can happen when you muck about as root. I'm not accusing, just pointing out the example of what happens when the root user messes with the menu on a user's desktop.

lmilano's advice will probably correct this particular issue, but there may be more issues with your user's home directory now, due to whatever was done that caused root permissions to be attached to what should be user-owned configuration files.

[lmilano]

Re: Problem editing kmenu

Thanks for the speedy reply. I tried that and it didn't work. I notice now the ~/.config/menus directory is owned by root. I presume that's the root of the problem. Is there a danger if I change to superuser and change the ownership of this directory. And why's it owned by root anyway? That seems strange...

Ah, you need to change ownership, too; the chown command does that

http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/chown/

You need to figure out what's the group of your username. "ls -l ~" will show that. Then you do

chown -R username:group ~/.config

Again, please check the manpage, I am not at my desktop now ...

As Dibl pointed out, this is not a usual thing to happen ...

[olembe]

Re: Problem editing kmenu

Thanks, guys; the chown command solved things.

I'm still mystified as to how it happened, though. This computer had a fresh install of Kubuntu just a few weeks ago, I've never logged in as root or used the su command, and have done very little to the computer since the install - nothing more than adding a few (common) applications. I'm 99.9% sure I never touched the permissions on that folder (or any folder, for that matter). I have Kubuntu installed on a different computer for if I want to try things out.

Oh well - it's a useful lesson learnt anyway. And my problem is solved! Thanks again.

[lmilano]

Re: Problem editing kmenu [solved]

great! Our pleasure