Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

Just a quick note – if you have problems accessing the “Main Menu” item from you “System” menu in Ubuntu Karmic, you may want to try the following.

If you click on the “Main Menu” item, and absolutely nothing happens, you will probably find a permission problem to be at the root of things (pun intended). It is fairly simply to solve. Open a terminal window – CTL+ALT+T if enabled on your system, or ALT+F2 and choose “Run in Terminal”. Type in “alacarte” in the command line (no quotes of course). Alacarte is the program that allows you to graphically manage your Gnome menus.
You will imediately see output indicating “Permission Denied” problems. Make a note of the directory, and have a look at the permissions on that directory and the files. In my case it turned out that the permission, both owner and group, had been set to “root”, rather than to myself. You need to change the permissions by using chown and chgrp. Note that if the permission were changed to “root”, you will probable need a root terminal to fix it – simple to open one by typing “sudo bash” at the command line.

Once you have fixed permissions, run alacarte again from a terminal – also try enabling/disabling some of the menu entries. There may still be permission problems, which will show up in the terminal. Fix these by using the same chown/chgrp commands to revery ownership to yourself from a root terminal.

Example – to change the ownership of the folder ~/gustible/.confg/menus from root to gustible, do this from the command line:
sudo bash
chown -R gustible ~/.config/menus
chgrp -R gustible ~/.config/menus
exit

Simple as that. A note – I am not 100% sure why my home folder permissions got toasted, but suspect it is because I ran alacarte from the command line as root – ie as “gksudo alacarte”. Watch out for that!