mintMenu Fails to Initialize on Login

Hi,

It's been about a week, and I still haven't heard anything back from you guys and I'm still experiencing this problem as of today. Can anyone help me with my issue?

Thanks,

Allen

Similar bug, Every single day since at least ubuntu lucid, some applets fail to load on gnome-panel. I know in a terminal, 'killall gnome-panel' forces it to reload, but man. Every single day without fail I have to reload the panel atleast once. Why isnt this fixed by now?

If you want relief from this bug, try patching /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/applications.py with my attached patch. To use:
1) save this file to /tmp
2) su or sudo /bin/bash
3) cd /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu
4) patch -p1 < /tmp/applications.py.patch
   if asked which file to patch, type in "applications.py"

I hope this is fixed upstream soon. My fix works around an issue (and my mint menu seems to be working OK now)

Hope this helps.

Frankly, to start off, let me say that I haven't used Linux Mint at all beginning quite shortly after this incident came up. I honestly don't see a clear advantage of Linux Mint over other Linux distributions. True, I do agree and I did see that many more things worked "out of the box" compared to most other Linux distributions, but I also did notice many more bugs on the side as well, none of them being as serious as this one where my Mint Menu (or simply a customized version of the GNOME Menu/Launcher) failed to load. Not to be condescending or too blunt or anything, especially considering this is Launchpad, but working as a part-time IT Consultant and with quite a decent background in Linux for that matter, I honestly don't recommend Linux Mint for use a a server nor as a desktop, be it for personal or professional use, not just from the bugs and errors I've seen and encountered, respectively, but also simply the lack of community support on their own bug reporting website that they point people to themselves to report bugs on!

I honestly just forgot about this bug, nor did I feel like taking it up and troubleshooting/investigation on my own, and what happened? Pretty much three months later, a kind community user who has no affiliation at all from what I can see with Linux Mint or any project for that matter found on Launchpad offers his two cents and supposed fix to the problem. I mean, open source projects as a whole were so successful and highly-regarded from the start because of such a wide community base who was actually engaged into the step-by-step development process on a day-to-day basis. And that wide community base grew as well on a day-to-day basis, with everyone offering friendly help and assistance at every step along the way without receiving any compensation of any sort for it. That's why many open source projects are well-known or considered to be plausible to become proprietary contenders in so many different fields of software. Testing/QA/Bug Reporting is simply a key part of any software development process, be it open-source or proprietary, and that's just an understatement.

To leave off on a lighter note, just to help out and offer my two cents, before I wiped the partition, I did find out that the bug was user-profile specific, meaning it would only appear in my primary user account and not in any of my other ones, nor in any newly created user accounts. In fact, I found the bug to be completely gone from my system with the deletion of a creation of a new primary user account. Wonder if that'll help your case @tfultz33 if you have nothing to lose in terms of a deleted user profile, and I really appreciate your time and help @davydm for your time in creating a fix, but apologize for not being able to test it and report back on whether the fix works or not. And just if you were wondering, for first time Linux users, I'm simply neutral about Linux Mint, as I wonder about the future development of the project like many, but I honestly don't plan on recommending it to anyone in the near future.

Like I said, my two cents. And I apologize once again for the rant.

I have the same problem here (64 bits version of linux mint)

I cannot find a file named applications.py in the directory /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu
Did you mean to patch the file mintMenu.py?

@daf:
Thanks! That worked like a charm for me! :D

@Lionel:
You can find the file in: /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/
(If you want to find a file you can use "locate filename" if you have locate installed or "find / -name 'applications.py' " or specify by "find /usr/lib/linuxmint/ -name 'application*' ")

Also affects Linux Mint 13 (32 bit) and Linux Mint 15 (64 bit).

Initial installation was fine. First APT update broke both.

The patch fixed it for me. Since it seems to break after updates, I wrote a script to apply it (while backing up the original file):

#!/bin/bash
TODAY=`date +%d%m%Y`
DIR=/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins
FILE=$DIR/applications.py

# Change this to where you downloaded the patch from
PATCH=$HOME/bin/applications.py.patch

if [ ! -e $FILE.$TODAY ]; then
  sudo cp $FILE $FILE.$TODAY
  if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
    echo fix-menu: backup of $FILE failed
    exit 1
  fi
fi
sudo patch --directory=/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins applications.py -i $PATCH

Does someone still have the file that was attached by daf? I have this issue and the attachment has been deleted.

LM 18.3 Sylvia "Mate 64-bit"

After editing apps, all apps disappeared from the menu... left only "favorites" button with favourites shortcuts

The following solution helped me:

in folder:
/home/Your_USERNAME/.config/menus

I created new folder (name it OLD) and moved to it all existing files (CUT/PASTE).

Applications in MintMenu again appeared in their places

Enjoy

Thank you opc330, This worked beautifully!!!