Several items in Lubuntu 18.10 application menu do nothing

[Radford Neal]

When testing Lubuntu 18.10, build of 2018-09-17, for i386, on a 32-bit MacBook Pro 1,1 (2006), booting a Live Session from DVD, several items in the Lubuntu applications menu viewed using the lower-left corner icon apparently do nothing.

These items are

   Accessories > Qlipper
   Accessories > compton
   Accessories > Document Viewer
   Office > Document Viewer

I can see no sign that a program is started at all after selecting any of these. Other applications selected from this menu start up and work fine.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1793234/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1793234

[ԜаӀtеr Ⅼарсһуnѕkі (wxl)]

Qlipper and compton both do not have dialogs. One is a clipboard manager and has a system tray icon. It's enabled by default and you can see the little clipboard at the lower left. It won't let you open a second copy of it by design, which is why it doesn't create more system tray icons. The other is a composite manager and has no system tray, even.

Now as far as "Document Viewer" is concerned, I'm not seeing that at all. Searching all of the XDG directories, I cannot find any reference to something like that. qpdfview should be in there and it runs fine on this end.

[Radford Neal (radfordneal)]

Thanks for looking at this. I've booted that DVD again, and now see that "Document Viewer" does not appear in the menus initially. It got put there when I tried installing evince to check whether a PDF file created in an earlier test was OK (not realizing then that qpdfview existed). The "Documen Viewer" menu items get created when evince is installed. And they don't do anything because evince doesn't run properly.

So there are no critical release issues here. There are a few user interface issues:

  1) Should Qlipper and compton be in menus when both are started automatically by default?
     (I checked with ps -alx | fgrep compton and found that it is running at the start.)
     I don't off-hand see when a user would use these menu items.

  2) Should installation of a package change the menus without asking, and without comment?

  3) Should there be an easy way for a user to see what program is started by a menu item?

  4) Should there be an easy way for a user to change the menu?

There's also the question of why evince doesn't run, but I'm not sure whether that might be expected with the transition to Qt.

[ԜаӀtеr Ⅼарсһуnѕkі (wxl)]

Great, so I'll make this bug invalid, yay!

---

You might want to file a bug against evince. Since we're trying to eliminate Gtk apps in lieu of Qt as much as we can, I wouldn't necessarily consider that a Lubuntu issue. I mean, it might be but further investigation is needed, thus the bug.

---

Regarding your questions, I would suggest that you take these and similar questions to our mailing list at <email address hidden>.

But:

 1. Working on that.
 2. Absolutely.
 3. Look at the value of the Exec key in the .desktop file, which is most often in /usr/share/applications.
 4. Yeah but this can be a little complicated. Assuming you don't want to read the Freedesktop specification and craft everything yourself, the easiest "standard" interface is xdg-desktop-menu. It might be worthwhile to see if kmenuedit might not provide a more user friendly GUI. I'd be down with including this. If not, perhaps a Qt port of menulibre. If you want to test this out and report to the list, I'd be happy to give it a go.

Thanks for the testing and for making Lubuntu better! We're always hanging out at #lubuntu-devel on Freenode, too, by the way. We have a Telegram bridge and you can get there by Matrix as well…