How to add menu items in System menu

I want to insert an item to System menu:

• Help and Support
• About Gnome
• About Ubuntu

More specifically, I want to insert a new item under "About Ubuntu".

Trying with alacarte doesn't work. Cloning "ubuntu-about.desktop" file and changing his attributes doesn't work too (I even rebooted the computer after that). Searching for categories in "/usr/share/desktop-directories" haven't worked too, and searching for "core" and "about" entries in /etc/xdc/menus neither. It isn't as easy as I thought it would be.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Solution 1:

You can add items to the first section of the System menu using Alacarte (System -> Preferences -> Main Menu).

The menu items below that are hard-coded in the gnome-panel source code, so other than editing the source code, there is no way to add more menu items to the second section of the System menu.

However, you can "replace" any of the three menu items by creating a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications with a specific filename.

• Help and Support = yelp.desktop
• About GNOME = gnome-about.desktop
• About Ubuntu = ubuntu-about.desktop

For example, lets say that instead of an About Ubuntu item in the System menu you want an Ubuntu Tweak item, simply copy the ubuntu-tweak.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/, renaming it to ubuntu-about.desktop:

cp /usr/share/applications/ubuntu-tweak.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/ubuntu-about.desktop

If you want to have the About Ubuntu menu item again, simply delete ubuntu-about.desktop:

rm ~/.local/share/applications/ubuntu-about.desktop