Removing all the crap from KDE menus and making it just the way you want it.


Overview:
I was very tired of having 100 menu items I don't use and wanted to create menus just the way I wanted so here is what I did.

Platform:
Mandrake 9.0

Instructions:
Firstly you need to tell your environment where to put your KDE settings. Because I wanted to start with a clean menu setup I moved KDEHOME from the default of ~/.kde to /opt/kde-<username>

Edit your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile and add the following this is for local

KDEHOME=/opt/kde-james
export KDEHOME

Create the dir mentioned above

mkdir -p /opt/kde-james
chown james /opt/kde-james -Rv

Log out and log back in.

You will find the following
  1. All your old menus missing
  2. kcontrol (KDE Control Centre) will be empty
  3. You won't be able to edit your taskbar preferences.
  4. kmenuedit displays no items.
  5. All the apps on your task bar save the K Menu and Show Desktop button are broken.

Launch kmenuedit and add your new menu items to taste

Remove all the old icons from your task bar and populate the taskbar with your new items you created with kmenuedit

To get your KDesktop Control Centre Back and the ability to edit taskbasr prefences

cp -prf ~/.kde/share/applnk-mdk/.hidden/ /opt/kde-james/share/applnk-mdk/

Result:
Here is a screen shot of my new menu sans the un-needed clutter