How to add “Refresh” option to right click menu in Lubuntu?

Question

I have many users at the place I work, expressing the notion of switching to Ubuntu. Most of them, for whatever weird reason wanting to know if its possible to have refresh added when you right click on the desktop.

Is that possible?

Answer 1

To add refresh command to right click context menu in Ubuntu 11.10 , install nautilus – refresh by running following commands in the terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nae-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nautilus-refresh

Once the package is installed, run following commands to restart nautilus or log out and log back in to see the changes.

nautilus -q

Answer 2

The default file browser in Lubuntu is PCManFM. So, if there are some possibilities to "refresh" desktop in Lubuntu, these should act on PCManFM. Thus, looking at the manual page of PCManFM (man pcmanfm), I found that running the following command(s) in terminal (lxterminal), the desktop will refresh

pcmanfm --desktop-off && pcmanfm --desktop --profile lubuntu

So far, so good; there is only left to do somehow to run this command from right click menu from the desktop. This can be done in 3 steps:

1. Create a new small script, let say refresh.sh, with the following two lines inside:

   #!/bin/sh
   pcmanfm --desktop-off && pcmanfm --desktop --profile lubuntu
   

   Don't forget to make it executable:

   chmod +x /path/to/script/refresh.sh
   

2. On the desktop, right click and select Desktop Preferences, click Advanced in the new opened window and tick Show menus provided by window managers when desktop is clicked.

   

3. Using the following command in terminal:

   sudo -i leafpad /usr/share/lubuntu/openbox/menu.xml
   

   edit the opened file /usr/share/lubuntu/openbox/menu.xml as follow (you only have to add the bold text and to use the right path for the script created at 1st step):

...
  <separator label="System" />
  <menu id="system-menu" icon="/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/categories/applications-system.png" />
  <item label="Refresh">
    <action name="Execute">
      <command>/path/to/script/refresh.sh</command>
    </action>
  </item>
  <item label="Log Out">
    <action name="Execute">
      <command>lubuntu-logout</command>
    </action>
  </item>
</menu>

</openbox_menu>

The result, as I tested in Lubuntu 13.04: (Make sure that you logout, and log back in for changes to take effect).

^{(Sorry for the low quality of the animated gif, but I just don't have time to find something better for the moment)}