17.3 The GNOME Menu and the Menu Panel Menus

Because different distributions organize their menus differently, you're best off exploring them yourself or referring to the documentation for your particular system. For the most part, however, the menus have similar contents: applications, help files, settings or preferences tools, utilities and system administration tools, and a few special items like Log Out and Run Command. The major difference is whether these items are split into several menus, as in the menu panel, or put in a single place, as in the GNOME menu.

There are, however, a number of common tasks related to menu items that do not vary across distributions, and we'll describe those here. First, there are context menus for individual menu items. To see them, right-click on a menu item (this is easier if you do not keep the left mouse button pressed while navigating your menus). The possible actions are:

Add this launcher to panel

Add the item as a launcher in the panel. If you have more than one panel, the launcher will be added to the first panel. You can then drag the launcher to wherever you actually want it.

Put into run dialog

Display this item as a shortcut in the Run Program dialog.

Entire menu

The two items here, "Add this as menu to panel" and "Add this as drawer to panel," allow you to add the entire submenu containing the launcher to your panel as either a drawer (a portion of panel that stays open when a menu might close) or as a menu.

The menu customization tools are one of the simplest and most obvious improvements in the GNOME 2 platform. To alter your menus, just open your Nautilus file manager and type "applications:///" into the location bar. The Applications display represents your menus and submenus as folders, with item launchers in them. Drag items around and move, copy, delete, or rename them as you see fit.

To add a submenu, right-click in an empty spot in the folder and select New Folder, then rename the folder, or right-click on it to set its name and icon.

To add a launcher, right-click in an empty spot in the folder and select New Launcher, then enter the name of the application, type in any pop-up text you want to describe it, and enter or browse for the command that starts the application itself. If you're not sure where that is, look in the /usr/bin directory, or use the which or locate commands (see Chapter 2) to find it.