Custom menus in Gnome 2

[cosc097 <cosc097 cosc canterbury ac nz>]

We're having problems with customizing the panel for our department's 
Linux installation (300+ machines)...

Under Red Hat 7.2 with GNOME 1.4.0, we were able to able to add 
customized menus to the panel. We set these up as a 'Normal Menu' and 
pointed the menu path to a custom directory hierarchy in 
/usr/share/gnome/ to populate the menu. The advantage of this is that 
although users may destroy their panel, they cannot destroy the contents 
of the menu itself and adding or replacing a menu is simple.

With Red Hat 8.0, we get GNOME 2.0.? which appears to have had this 
functionality removed. We can use Drawers to produce a custom 'menu' 
(although we prefer the Menu appearance with text and small icons to the 
Drawer default large icons with Tool tips ) but we cannot see how to 
have a central repository for them, finding it necessary to have the 
whole Drawer setup in each user's account.

Ultimately what we would like is to be able to still have customized 
Menus as with GNOME 1.4.0, but we would be satisfied with a Drawer that 
loaded its contents from a central repository, rather than from the 
user's own .gconf directory.

Does anybody know how to do this or has the functionality been removed 
entirely? Any help would be much appreciated.


Blair Wilson
cosc097 cosc canterbury ac nz
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury
Christchurch
New Zealand