?HOWTO: Recover an empty kcontrol tree

empty kcontrolLast night I opened KDE control center to change my desktop settings and I was shocked when I found that kcontrol was empty but for the OBEX Devices panel. Alll the modules that were supposed to be inside kcontrol where inside the KDE “Lost and Found” folder instead. A superficial search in the KDE mailing lists returned a few matches about this problem on KDE4 (did you know that kcontrol is currently unmaintained and that it’s gonna die real soon now?) but I’m currently in KDE 3.5.5 so that doesn’t apply to me.
Tonight Google came to the rescue: after digging a bit more I found this post in the debian forums which mentions that this might be a bug in a debian package and spells out the answer to my problem:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/kde-essential.menu /etc/xdg/menus/kde-applications-merged/kde-essential.menu 

recovered kcontrolVoilá! Now my kcontrol is fully populated again.
[tags]kcontrol, kde, debian, linux[/tags]

2 thoughts on “?HOWTO: Recover an empty kcontrol tree”

  1. I think it would be better to drop the “-s” flag from the link, which would make the link a hard link rather than a symbolic link.

    What’s the difference, you ask?

    A symbolic link essentially redirects to the data referenced by another filename. The symbolic link breaks if the linked file is deleted.
    A hard link maps the same data to both places in the files system. Thus, the other link remains if either is deleted.

  2. i love you.. you really saved my day, with this article

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