How to install gnome2-globalmenu from source for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick)

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This project introduces document-oriented concepts into GNOME, and improves GNOME's respect for Fitts's law. Most GTK applications work just fine with Global Menu.

There are several advantages by adopting a shared global menu bar in Gnome (thanks Matthew for organizing these):

* It works better with narrow windows, because the width of the menus isn't limited to the width of the window. (This is a problem for Gimp and Inkscape especially.)
* It's less confusing --- when two menu bars are visible on-screen at once, sometimes people choose the wrong one.
* Global Menu is the first step to move toward a Document Centric Desktop Environment ( ThoughtsOnADocumentCentricGnome ) which is, according to us, a long-term trend in DEs.

Note:- This is only for advanced users this might breakdown you system completely

Install gnome2-globalmenu from source

1. Download the latest source from here and extract it. Lets say you have it extracted to

/home//Desktop/gnome-globalmenu-0.7.10/

2. Download the older source from the Git rep: here and extract.

/home//Desktop/gnome-globalmenu-gnome-globalmenu-50c0fd1/

3. Open the older source and copy the ./autogen file and paste it in the gnome-globalmenu-0.7.10 folder.

4. Now, navigate to gnome-globalmenu-0.7.10 folder, and install the following packages one by one in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install intltool
sudo apt-get install libtool
sudo apt-get install libconf2-dev
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libwnck*
sudo apt-get install libgnome-menu*
sudo apt-get install libpanelapplet-*
sudo apt-get install libnotify*
sudo apt-get install xfce4-panel*

5. Now run aclocal:

aclocal

Now you can follow the manually compiling the source tutorial from the wiki here

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --disable-tests --without-xfce4-panel

make

export GTK_MODULES=globalmenu-gnome

sudo make install

Finally kill the X server or logout and login.

Right click on the panel and add new, select gnome global menu and voila, you have the global menu in Ubuntu 10.10. You could make it a script and just run it once. Make sure you use "-y" tag for apt-get in the script to avoid it asking for your input whether to install the package or not.

PS: The global menu does not work with firefox

Via ubuntu forums

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