Gnome menus

 I wanted to add an application, which I installed manually, to the main menu. Nothing happened. After searching around, I cam across complaints about alacarte, the menu editing application for Gnome. I had never heard of it. This is one of the few times that looking at .xsession-errors in my home directory actually helped. IN addition to the errors I don't understand, there were some  "permission denied" errors with alacarte references. This led me to this solution, thanks to jpeddicord on the Ubuntu Forums for this solution:

sudo chown -R gianluigi:gianluig ~/.config