Problems with menus and places

[Manfred Muench <contact manfred-muench com>]

Dear all,

this email describes two issues around the same task, one is related to
gnome-vfs. Please excuse the first part, but it hopefully gives you some
idea about what I want.

I have recently installed GNOME 2.10 (from garnome ball 2-10.0.1) and
have some trouble with my main menu now. I want to add new programs to
this menu but right-clicking on the "foot"-icon does not give me
anything like "Properties" or so. It only shows
- Help
- Remove from Panel
- Move
- Lock to Panel

When going into a menu, I don't get appropriate selections upon
right-clicking either. There, I can only find:
- Add this launcher to panel
- Entire Menu
-> Add this as drawer to panel
-> Add this as menu to panel

Nothing else.

Also, the second way described in the GNOME manual, to start nautilus
and go to "applications:///" does not help. "applications:///" is not a
valid location." is the error message in return. (BTW, that also happens
with some other standard locations which were available in my previous
GNOME 2.6 installation (e.g. system, preferences), locations such as
"fonts:///", "computer:///", or "burn:///" work, though).

I have tried to fiddle through the .directory and .desktop-entries in
~/garnome/share/applications but to no avail. To be honest, I somewhat
gave up understanding how this works, although I'm still eager to learn
about that. GNOME's documentation is a bit lacking here -- or does
anyone have a link to a nice and detailed explanation how to tweak these
entries?

What can I do to add programs to my menus? What have I done wrong
before? Especially, I want the KDE menus back which were automatically
installed in GNOME with my SuSE 9.2 installation. Any hints? Also, where
are my other locations in nautilus? What's wrong with my gnome-vfs?

Any help appreciated!

Cheers,
Manfred

PS: I'm running SuSE 9.2 -- although I don't think it matters which
distro I use since I suspect the problem in my GNOME installation.

PPS: Please advise me if I'm on the wrong list.

-- 
Dr. Manfred Muench
Hanfu Ya Yuan, Hanfu Jie No. 4
Haitang Building 7B
Nanjing, 210018, P.R. China
Tel.: +86 139 14778816