Adding BOINC Manager to the K Menu

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The KDE 'K' menu

This is the menu normally found by clicking the button at the bottom left of the KDE desktop. If you're more familiar with Windows, then you'll probably think of it as the Start menu. Here's a picture:


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The K menu is what you get when you click on the K button. If you use a SUSE distribution, the K menu is likely to be called the SUSE menu, and the button will probably have the SUSE logo on it. It will still be in the same place, though:


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Other KDE-based distributions may make similar changes. Of course, one of the advantages of the KDE interface is that it is very configurable, so you may have moved the panel containing the K menu button from the bottom of the screen to another location or made any of hundreds of other changes: however, I'm assuming that if you know how to do that, you probably don't need a lot of the detail in this article.

Customising the K menu You can edit the K menu in many different ways. What we'll stick to here are the customisations you can do to make the BOINC Manager easily available to you. The first steps are: 

   •   Open the K menu by clicking on the button
   •   Right-click anywhere on the menu. This opens a context menu containing the following items:
           •  Add Item to Desktop
           •  Add Item to Main Panel
           •  Edit Item
           •  Put Into Run Dialog (depending on the context, this item may not show)
   •   Select Edit item, as shown below:


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Once you have clicked on Edit Item, the KDE Menu Editor will open. You may have to click on the Menu Editor window to make the K menu disappear. The KDE Menu Editor will open with the menu item you had highlighted when you invoked it, selected. This may not be what you want, but it doesn't matter. The first thing that you will notice about the KDE Menu Editor is that it shows the items from the K menu in the left hand panel. Some of the items have sub-items. These are the menu items in the K menu that have little right-pointing arrows to their right that you can click on to open a sub-menu. In the image below, I've opened up one of the items that has sub-items for you to see. You open and close them by clicking on the +/- symbol that you see to their left (click the '+' to open a sub-menu: click '-' to close a sub-menu): just like you do when exploring a file system using a file manager like Konqueror. By the way, everyone's K menu is different. It depends on the applications that are installed on the system and on any customisations the user has made. So don't worry if you don't have the same things on your K menu as I do.


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At the bottom of the list, you will see a list of items that don't have sub-menus. These are just individual programs that either can't be easily classified into another menu or sub-menu; or else they are kept at the top level to be easily accessible. You can add the BOINC Manager into any menu or sub-menu that takes your fancy. You can even create new menus and sub-menus yourself and locate it in one of those; but I'm going to assume that we want the BOINC Manager to be easily accessible from the K menu and that we are therefore going to add it as a standalone item amongst the other standalone items at the bottom of the list. Here are the steps you will need to take. In the KDE Menu Editor: 

   •     Right-click on any of the standalone items at the bottom of the list in the left-hand pane.
   •     Select New Item from the context menu:


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• Enter BOINC Manager into the New Item Dialog:

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• Click OK and you will see that a new item has been added underneath the one that you had highlighted:


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Now you can see that an entry has been started for the new menu item, in the right-hand pane where BOINC Manager has been entered as the application name. You now need to fill in the rest of the details in the right-hand pane, as follows: 

   •   Enter a description (optional). If you enter a description, that is what you will see on the K
       Menu, followed by the name in brackets. You will probably want to leave it blank.

• Enter a comment (optional). This is for your own reference and you will probably want to leave it blank in this case. • Enter a command (required). This is the command that should be issued in order to start the BOINC Manager. If you installed from the RPM, you should enter: 

 /usr/bin/boincmgr.  You can, of course, browse to the boincmgr executable by clicking on the browse button located to the right of the command entry input.
 If you did not use the RPM and are not sure what the correct command is, then you should do the following:
     •   Open a terminal window (e.g. K menu --> Terminal Sessions --> Shell)
     •   In the terminal window, type: which boincmgr
     •   Copy the response from the which command into the command input box in
         K Menu Editor
     •   If you got no response from the which command, this means that the
         BOINC Manager application is not on your PATH, and is wherever you installed it.  If you still don't know where it is, then you can try using the locate command by opening a terminal window and typing: locate -w boincmgr.          Note, however, that this will not work unless the program updatedb has been run          since you installed BOINC. It usually runs automatically, about once per day or          however often you have set it to: however you can run it manually by opening a          terminal session as root (e.g. K menu --> Terminal Sessions --> Root Shell) and          typing: updatedb.  The locate command may return several several lines of output. You will have to decide which one is correct and copy that to the command input box of the K Menu Editor.

• Check Place in System Tray if you would like BOINC Manager to appear in the system tray (optional). • Enter a Work Path. This is required. For most applications, this would be optional, but for BOINC Manager you must enter the correct work path. The work path is the directory (folder) from which the BOINC Manager will be invoked. In order for the BOINC Manager to connect successfully to your running client, it must be invoked from a directory that contains the file: gui_rpc_auth.cfg. This file contains a password automatically generated when BOINC is installed and it would be a good idea at this point to edit this file using your favourite text editor just to ensure that there is a blank line after the line containing the password – i.e. there should be two lines in the file: the line containing the password followed by a blank line. If you carried out your installation using the RPM, then the entry you will need to make for the work path is: /var/lib/boinc. If you used a different installation method, you must use the path to wherever your BOINC installation is located. If you really have no idea where the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file is located, you can try using the locate command as described above. Another technique is to copy the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file to your home directory and enter your home directory as the work path, e.g. /home/peter. If you do this, of course, the BOINC Manager menu item will only work for you; because other users cannot look into your home directory. Once again, you can browse to the correct location, if you prefer to do it that way, by clicking on the browse button with the folder image on it. • Enter a shortcut key (optional). If you really want to do this, you can click on the Current Shortcut Key button at the bottom right of the KDE Menu Editor. The following dialog then appears:


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Enter the key combination you would like by simply pressing the keys (e.g. Alt-B). The dialog will close automatically and you should now see that combination entered onto the Current shortcut key button. Finally, you might, optionally, like to associate the BOINC Manager with an icon. To do this, you must click on the large button to the right of the Name and Description fields, select the Other icons radio button and then browse to an appropriate image on your file system. KDE requires an image in PNG format, so I downloaded the BOINC logo from the BOINC website, opened it up in the GIMP, saved it in PNG format and then selected it as my image for the BOINC Manager. You will notice that I stored the image in /var/lib/boinc. This seemed like a reasonable location:


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The completed dialog on my system looks like this:


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Notice how the icon has been placed against the BOINC Manager entry in the left pane as well. This is how it will appear on your K menu. Once you have your entry, as in the image above, you can drag 'n drop it anywhere in the menu system that you like: but I used to be a librarian so you will see that I have cleverly arranged it so the the BOINC Manager is correctly placed alphabetically in the list of standalone items. Some habits never die. So, all that's left for you to do now is to save the entry. You can do this by either clicking on the save icon in the tool bar, or by doing File --> Save from the main menu. The new configuration takes a second or two to save, so you will probably see a progress bar during the saving process. Obviously wait for this to finish before you do anything else in the K Menu Editor. Note that it is important to save before you exit! Now you can exit the K Menu Editor by doing File --> Quit from the main menu. Testing the new menu item If all has gone as it should have, you will now be able to open the K menu and select the BOINC Manager from amongst the standalone applications at the bottom of the list (or from wherever you located the entry we created earlier):


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The most important thing to realise at this moment is that all that has gone before assumes that youhave BOINC installed correctly, and that you can start the BOINC client successfully. So before going any further, you should check that the BOINC client is running and start it if it isn't. If this is not the case, then please check out the documentation for the kind of installation that you have performed. Once you are happy that the BOINC client is running, select the BOINC Manager from the menu and, with luck, the BOINC Manager should start. If it does, well, congratulations! If it doesn't, check out the troubleshooting tips below: and, if things still don't work, try getting more help from: http://pirates.spy-hill.net/Help.php

Troubleshooting tips Can you run the BOINC Manager manually? The first thing to check is that you can get the BOINC Manager running successfully at all. You may already know this because you've been running it successfully and just wanted to put it on the K menu. If that's not the case, then please return to your installation instructions and do whatever is necessary to allow you to start the BOINC Manager successfully, manually. If you can't do that, then please look for more help, for example, at: http://pirates.spy-hill.net/Help.php.

Check all paths Make sure that the command path is correct and the the work path is also correct. If the command path is not correct, simply nothing will happen when you select the K menu entry. If your work path is not correct, the BOINC Manager will start, but you may get an error message similar to this:


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Go back and follow the instructions above again, making sure that the paths you enter into the K Menu Editor are exactly those you would use when starting the BOINC Manager manually.

Authorisation file Make doubly sure that the file gui_rpc_auth.cfg is present in the work path folder. Make sure that the spelling of the file name is exactly right if you copied it from its default location, and check that it is configured correctly as explained above.

If all else fails ... Did we mention that you could look for help at: http://pirates.spy-hill.net/Help.php

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