Qubes 4.0 Desktop file no longer working

[Andrew Morgan]

Hey there,

The upgrade to Qubes 4.0 was mostly painless, with a few things needed
to be set up and worked-around here and there. I did do a backup from
R3.2 and restore to R4.0.

The only issue I'm still facing is that none of my .desktop files
(application menus under the XFCE menu) seem to work. When I click on,
say, Personal - Terminal the Personal VM is started, but no terminal
shows up. Doing the same thing results in nothing happening.

Running `qvm-sync-appmenus personal` results in no change. The .desktop
files are in dom0 and personal, but for some reason the application
still isn't launching. I have to manually launch everything from Qubes
Manager -> Run command in VM -> gnome-terminal.

Is there a way I can debug this further?

Thanks,
Andrew Morgan

[Drew White]

Check the syntax for the launching.
Manually enter the command into a terminal and see what happens.
Then run the command inside the guest and see if it works.

if none of that works, then it's the actual run command from Dom0 you will need to investigate.

[Andrew Morgan]

It ended up being due to the disposal VMs for each AppVM not being set
properly. Figured it out by running a qvm-run command manually, such as:

qvm-run -q -a --service --dispvm=personal --
qubes.StartApp+org.gnome.Terminal

returning:

Refusing to create DispVM out of this AppVM, because
template_for_dispvms=False

Once I corrected the DispVM option, rerunning the command produces no
error, but still nothing happens.

Maybe the services aren't working within the VM?

Thanks,
Andrew Morgan

[Neelix]

Hi Andrew,


Did you also make a back up of the templates? Or did you installed the
same applications on your new templates?

--
Kind Regards,

Neelix

[Andrew Morgan]

Yes, I did make a backup of the templates which my AppVMs are still using.

I haven't switched to the new templates yet (which may not be necessary
as we can just change the virtualization type of the templates in Qubes
Manager? Or is there some special Qubes 4.0 stuff in the new templates?)

Thanks,
Andrew Morgan

[Neelix]

No, I don't think there is anything 'special'. I just read in the irc
channel that there are more people with the same problem.

--
Kind Regards,

Neelix