I have used Nix package manager to install Abiword in a Slackware/Salix install with Mate desktop. The application runs fine but it has not appeared in the main Menu. Is this usual for applications installed by Nix?
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Do you have a `.desktop` file somewhere in `~/.nix-profile/` ? For example in `~/.nix-profile/etc/xdg`? (Just a guess, better use `find ~/.nix-profile -name '*.desktop'`) – Daniel Jour Nov 25 '15 at 09:09
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No, there is no such file on my system. – rnso Nov 25 '15 at 12:46
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It will be very useful if Nix package manager could have a GUI front-end. This front-end may have synaptic-like (used with Debian etc) package management and also a menu from which all applications installed in Nix package system can be run. – rnso Nov 25 '15 at 13:06
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What are the values of the `XDG_CONFIG_HOME` and `XDG_CONFIG_DIRS` environment variables? As for the GUI: Nix and NixOS are still relatively young projects. With a further growing user base there probably will be a graphical frontend in the near future. – Daniel Jour Nov 25 '15 at 15:39
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The command 'export | grep XDG' gives XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/usr/share/gdm/" and XDG_SESSION_COOKIE=".....long number....." – rnso Nov 25 '15 at 15:43
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I got this working on openSUSE plasma-desktop by adding the following to my bashrc
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=~/.local/share/:~/.nix-profile/share:/usr/share
cp -f ~/.nix-profile/share/applications/*.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
Then logging out or running kbuildsycoca4 rebuilds the start menu.
When I only set the XDG_DATA_DIRS, the icons would appear in the start menu. However kdelibs is trying to make those .desktop files executable and add a xdg-open shebang to them, which does not work since .nix-profile is not writeable.
Thus it was also necessary to copy the desktop files to a ~/.local/share/applications/, which however also needs the XDG_DATA_DIRS set to ~/.nix-profile, because the application icons still reside there.
knedlsepp
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