Generating menus

To maintain a large number of graphical applications that is using a SLURM backend in different way we need an easy way of creating shortcuts and menus without a lot of manual work. To support this the other part of the GFX Launcher framework is the gfxmenu command which is a special tool for automatically generating a user menu structure and related shortcuts with gfxlaunch commands.

The main concept is to provide a script for each application that is going run on the backend nodes. The scripts contains the commands for how to start the application and a number of special tags for configuring the behavior of the user interface presented by the gfxlaunch command. gfxmenu reads these scripts and automatically creates a user menu structure according to the tags in the scripts.

The gfxmenu command should be run at user login and creates entries in the .local/ and .config/ folders of the users home directory. A suitable place for this script is a runscript in the /etc/profile.d folder, calling the gfxmenu command (described below).

Creating start-scripts for use with gfxmenu

To use the gfxmenu tool to generate menus, every application that should be integrated into the menu needs to have a special start script. The filenames of these scripts should be in the form of:

[Application name and version].sh

An example of a script filename is shown below:

blender-3.1.0.sh

The main purpose of the script is to launch the application and provide launcher tags customising the gfxlaunch user interface. If the application requires hardware accelerated graphics it is usually started with the vglrun command in this script. An example of such a script is shown below:

#!/bin/sh

##LDT category = "Post Processing"
##LDT title = "ParaView 5.9.1"
##LDT group = "ondemand"

vglrun /sw/pkg/paraview/5.9.1/bin/paraview

The ##LDT tags are special tags used by the gfxmenu scripts to greate gfxlaunch commands in the desktop shortcuts with the proper settings and window title.

The following attributes are supported by gfxmenu:

Attribute	Description
##LDT category	Menu category to add the menu item.
##LDT title	Menu item name. This will also be assigned to the GfxLauncher UI.
##LDT part	Default partition used when submitting the job
##LDT job	Job type. Currently one of vm, notebook and jupyterlab
##LDT group	Partition group to display in user interface (–group)
##LDT feature_disable	Hide the feature selection combo.
##LDT part_disable	Hide the partition selection combi

When the job attribute is specified the script can be empty except for the attribute declarations.

A script for a Jupyter Lab session is shown below:

#!/bin/sh

##LDT category = "Development"
##LDT title = "Jupyter Lab"
##LDT part = "lu"
##LDT job = "jupyterlab"

Generating menus and desktop entries

The gfxmenu uses the directories in the /etc/gfxlauncher.conf configuration files to read the start-scripts and generate the menus items and directories. An example of running this command is shown below:

$ gfxmenu
LUNARC HPC Desktop - User menu tool - Version 0.9.4
Written by Jonas Lindemann (jonas.lindemann@lunarc.lu.se)
Copyright (C) 2018-2023 LUNARC, Lund University
Using configuration file : /sw/pkg/ondemand-dt/etc/gfxlauncher.conf

Adding menus to shared desktop setup

The generated menus can be added by using the following profile.d script. This script activates the menu if the user is found in the specified grantfile.

/etc/profile.d/ondemand-dt-00.sh:

#/bin/bash

export ONDEMAND_DT_DIR=/sw/pkg/gfxlauncher
export PATH=${ONDEMAND_DT_DIR}:$PATH

# Generate user menu

gfxmenu --silent &>/dev/null

This script will generate a user menu structure in the users home directory. With the following layout:

In the [User home directory]/.local/share/applications folder will contain the generated desktop shortcuts (.desktop) with the prefix set by the configuration variable, desktop_entry_prefix. A sample directory is shown below:

$ ls
gfx-abaqus_cae_6.13-5.desktop           gfx-comsol_multiphysics_5.3.desktop
gfx-abaqus_cae_v6r2017.desktop          gfx-fiji_1.53c.desktop
gfx-abaqus_cae_v6r2019.desktop          gfx-fiji_2.5.0.desktop
gfx-amira_6.5.0.desktop                 gfx-freesurfer_5.3.0.desktop
...

The [User home directory]/.local/share/desktop-directories folder will contain the menu directory files (.directory) for each of the categories defined in the run scripts.

$ ls -1
3d_modeling.directory
3d_visualisation.directory
cae.directory
chemistry.directory

The generated menu itself is located in [User home directory]/.config/menus/applications-merged/applications.menu. This file is overwritten each time the gfxmenu command is executed. In the menus folder, gfxmenu will also create symlinks to gnome-applications-merged, kde-applications-merged and mate-applications-merged.

The menu should update automatically by the desktop environment when the files in these directories are modified or updated.