gnome-panel doesn't show all menu items

The menu is being "shortened" while there's plenty of space. Usually doesn't happen though.

This only happens when the menu bar is on the bottom of the screen. I believe the reason for the problem is the following. If the icons are not loaded in memory, Gnome computes the menu height ignoring the icons, i.e. considering only the text height. And it chooses a menu position that is correct for THAT height. Then, when the icons are loaded, the menu height increases, but Gnome does not update the menu position, so the menu ends up too low and gets truncated. This is just a guess though.

Thanks for your bug, I've forwarded it upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331780

Confirming since there is a duplicate

Confirmed by me too. I have the menu located on the bottom of the screen and I'm using cutting-edge version of Dapper system.

As far as I can observe, this happens only the first time you open the menu. Next time all the items are rendered correctly. Seguso's guessing might be right and I would like fixing it by icons preloading, since it would also eliminate another gnome-panel bug (#44002).

This happens when you update the system or install new programs which are added to the menus. That may make it look unpredictable, since you don't always use the menus after downloading updates.

At first i thought the upgrade to Edgy fixed this problem. The menu feels a -lot- faster than before, and i didn't get the earlier described behaviour.
However after using Edgy for a day or three, i sometimes was able to reproduce this bug. Has anyone else?

i gave up on this a few months ago and put the menu at the top of the screen...seems that was a good choice considering that this bug is still present...youll get used to it after a while

This still happens on an updated Edgy intall. Whenever you update, install or uninstall, you get that "problem".

On 10/2/06, Ramon de Ruiter <email address hidden> wrote:
> At first i thought the upgrade to Edgy fixed this problem. The menu feels a -lot- faster than before, and i didn't get the earlier described behaviour.
> However after using Edgy for a day or three, i sometimes was able to reproduce this bug. Has anyone else?

Yes, it seems to happen once in a while with Edgy too.

It _might_ only be happening after installing new applications or
similar; but I have not yet confirmed this.

--
Mvh,
Lars Rune Nøstdal
http://lars.nostdal.org/

It seems Jo-Erland is right. I was just dist-upgrading my install, and just generally browsing through my menu's. The bug then appeared again. When the upgrade was finished, i couldn't reproduce it anymore.
So basically: not yet fixed, but much less annoying than in Dapper :)

No, actually, it's the same. Perhaps there were more frequent updates when you ran Dapper?

I confirm that the bug is *still* present in Edgy. And it's *really* annoying!

Good news. This seems fixed in feisty! I couldn't reproduce it even restarting the system.

Sorry Seguso, but this behaviour still exists in feisty, except if the recent gnome-panel update fixes that.

Yeah, I don't believe that this bug has anything to do with restarting the system.

It's fairly reproducible by installing packages that affect the gnome menu. Take the game "atomix" for example. It puts a menu entry under "Games". So to reproduce, insure that your menu is working correctly beforehand. Then install atomix and atomix-data in Synaptic. Now the menu will behave buggily. Then look at all of the sub-menus until they display correctly again. Then you can reproduce this bug again by uninstalling atomix and atomix-data!

This might not be a bug so much with gnome-panel as it is one with how Ubuntu's packaging system messes with the menu.

I don't think it's directly linked with package management as much as
that being the best example of the bug.

If the menu contents change, then the next time the menu's open gnome
has to reload all the menu icons. When it opens it draws the menu with
enough space for the menu item names, but then has to expand it to fit
the icons - and if there's not enough space at the bottom of the
screen it scrolls instead.

I imagine you could fix the problem by forcing it to load the icons
before drawing the menu on screen, or redrawing the menu once they're
loaded anyway.

On 12/21/06, Jeff250 <email address hidden> wrote:
> Yeah, I don't believe that this bug has anything to do with restarting
> the system.
>
> It's fairly reproducible by installing packages that affect the gnome
> menu. Take the game "atomix" for example. It puts a menu entry under
> "Games". So to reproduce, insure that your menu is working correctly
> beforehand. Then install atomix and atomix-data in Synaptic. Now the
> menu will behave buggily. Then look at all of the sub-menus until they
> display correctly again. Then you can reproduce this bug again by
> uninstalling atomix and atomix-data!
>
> This might not be a bug so much with gnome-panel as it is one with how
> Ubuntu's packaging system messes with the menu.
>
> --
> gnome-panel doesn't show all menu items
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/30146
>

I think that in any case gnome-panel's behavior year is buggy, but what leans me toward the packaging system being part at fault too is that I can change, add, and remove menu contents using alacarte all day long without this bug appearing. Of course, this is in userland, but I can do the same with system menu entries.

For example, cp /usr/share/applications/totem.desktop /usr/share/applications/totem2.desktop . Now there are two entries for totem under "Sound & Video" without the bug appearing. Now edit totem2.desktop and where it says Categories=, change "AudioVideo" to say "Utility". Now totem appears under accessories. Now delete totem2.desktop, and totem's phantom menu entry disappears, all of this without the bug appearing.

In my previous comment, "year"->"here".

Jeff250, are you still speaking about the menu placement?

Right, I think so--I've been speaking about the bug where the menus or sub-menus from the gnome menu bar are sometimes displayed too short and have arrows on the top and bottom as if they haven't enough screen height to display (even though they do) when the gnome menu bar is on a panel on the bottom of the screen.

that's the correct bug page then

I think I've figured out why the package manager seems to trip it up. It presents a unique case, where both the contents of /usr/share/pixmaps and /usr/share/applications change at the same time, or at least in between menu browsing.

Here's an example that I've found to rigorously reproduce this bug:
0. (Gnome ,menu must be on bottom panel.)
1. Browse menu until bug no longer is present.
2. sudo cp /usr/share/applications/totem.desktop /usr/share/applications/test.desktop
3. sudo touch /usr/share/pixmaps/test.png
4. Browse menu and notice that the bug appears

The important thing is that you don't browse the menu in between steps 1 and 4, because just doing either step 2 or step 3 does not seem to produce the bug. Just when both happen in between menu browsing does it occur. Also, steps 2 and 3 can be performed in reverse order, i.e. step 3 then step 2. And also, it seems that to reproduce this, it needs a real ".desktop file" in the applications directory, whereas a phony touch'ed png file will suffice (although so will a real image) in triggering the bug.

And, of course, to reproduce it again:
1. Browse menu until bug is no longer present
2. sudo rm /usr/share/applications/test.desktop
3. sudo rm /usr/share/pixmaps/test.png
4. Browse menu and notice that the bug appears

please lets bump up the importance...this is a long-standing bug and very visible and annoying. it also seems that the fix might be quite easy if its a package managing issue.

that's not a package management problem, rather an upstream bug code, bumping the importance will not make it fixed faster, it's not fixed because that's an upstream problem and people are busy, if you want to get it fixed faster maybe start working on a patch for it

sorry - didnt mean to be pushy...

my programming skills are limited to basic python so i dont think im
the man for the job...ill just keep the menu at the top of the screen
instead.

thanks

fixed upstream

That upload fixes the bug:

 gnome-panel (2.17.92-0ubuntu1) feisty; urgency=low
 .
   * New upstream version:
     Panel:
     - Fix wrong initial position of menu (Ubuntu: #30146)
     - Code cleanups
     - Add missing mnemonics in main menu
     - Don't show multiple times a dialog about an applet failing to load
     - Don't try to load again in the same session an applet that failed to
       load before
     - Get localized names when starting a launcher so that the startup
       notification use the translated name
     - Fix image size on the run dialog so that it's always the correct size
     - Set automatic gravity for the labels in the menubar, so that japanese
       and other scripts are correctly displayed on vertical panels
     Workspace Switcher Applet:
     - Make mouse scrolling correctly work in RTL environments
     - Performance improvement when a workspace is renamed/added/removed.
       This has an important impact when accessibility is turned on.
     - Fix speed of the spin button for number of workspaces (Ubuntu: #83334)
     Clock Applet:
     - Set automatic gravity for the clock label, so that japanese and other
       scripts are correctly displayed on vertical panels
     - Make it possible to use markup for the clock text, which is useful
       with custom format
     - Don't wake up every second if it's not necessary
     Misc:
     - Add missing check for gconf for libpanel-applet
     - Require pango 1.15.4
     - Distribute MAINTAINERS
     Docs:
     - Update fish screenshot
   * debian/control.in:
     - Build-Depends on libgconf2-dev (>= 2.6.1), libpango1.0-dev (>= 1.15.4)
     - package maintainer by the Ubuntu Desktop Team
   * debian/patches/07_use_beagle.patch:
     - dropped the patch changing the search menu item, beagle users want to
       use gnome-search-tools also and beagle is to the applications menu
   * debian/patches/09_lpi_src.patch:
     - updated
   * debian/patches/11_panel_addto_dialog.patch:
     - updated
   * debian/patches/12_autoreconf.patch:
     - renamed to reflect the right command and updated

This bug seems fixed for the primary menu (the one with Accessories, Games, Graphics, etc., a la the attachment on comment1), but not for its sub-menus (see attachment of this comment).

I'm using 2.17.92-0ubuntu4.

The option to specify number of workspaces has disappeared from the Panel Preferences dialog box so I cannot add workspaces, only change the way the two are presented.