the empty quarter

Wine adds a menu entry “Browse C: Drive” in the Applications menu. By default, this doesn’t work and produces an error message in Xubuntu 8.04. Here’s how to fix it.

1. Run the following command to open the configuration file which controls what the menu entry does:
   
   sudo mousepad /usr/share/applications/wine-browsedrive.desktop

2. Replace the line
   
   Exec=xdg-open ~/.wine/drive_c

   
   with the line
   
Exec=xdg-open $HOME/.wine/drive_c

3. Save, log out and back in (or Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X) and the menu should now open the drive_c directory in Thunar.

And what is the unfamiliar xdg-open command, one might ask? According to its man page, it opens a URL (file, http, ftp) in the user’s preferred application. But apparently it does not recognize the ~ shorthand for the current user’s home directory.