Use Global Menu on Ubuntu 10.04

Recently Mark Shuttleworth announce a new feature for Ubuntu 10.10 version. It will appear in only on netbook version. This feature won't be available on desktop version. Name of this new feature is "Global Menu".

Mark shuttleworth said on his blog:

We’re going to put the menu in the panel on the netbook edition of Ubuntu, and not on the desktop edition, because that’s where the screen real-estate is most precious. There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart. Those questions are greatly diminished in the netbook environment, by definition.

Also, the netbook edition has a reduced application load. That will reduce the number of applications we need to get this working on.

However, it will be straightforward to use this on your desktop too, if you want, and we’d encourage people to try with that configuration. The more testing we have early on, the better we’ll understand how it works with different applications. It will be easy to add to the standard desktop panel for people who want to try it out, or prefer to work that way.

On this blogpost Mark explain everything about this 'Netbook Global Menu". He just want to make it clear that why this kind of menu is need on netbooks. Netbook computer has a very limited vertical size on screen. Standard is 1024×600. There is no problem about widh but vertical space is too short that developer need to think more. At last the confirm a solution. They add a 'Global Menu'.

Global Menu is a kind of Mac OS X like globally-shared menu bar. Which will use for applications launched in desktop session. This is currently only available for Gnome.

Though this 'Global menu' is only for netbooks and will release in Ubuntu 10.10 version, you can start to use it right now.

First add the repository in you system with this command in terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:globalmenu-team/ppa

Than apply the command below for Karmic and Lucid

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gnome-globalmenu

Remember that this Global Menu is not that which Mark shuttlworth said in his blogpost. This application already running and developing by Ubuntu community. It's name is Gnome2 Global Manu. It has some limitation.

• It will not work in Firefox and Open Office
• It will not display window title and controls.

Image and news credit: Webupd8