Update the GlobalMenu in Ubuntu 9.10

[Updated 25 November to include a link to the release notes. -Peng]

I’ve noticed for some time that when I open the Epiphany browser the GlobalMenu identifies it as “Epiphany Web Bookmarks”. Since the web browser and the bookmark manager are two different apps I wanted to file a bug against it. There’s just one problem. When you go to the page to report a new issue with the GlobalMenu the first thing you see is

IMPORTANT: Before reporting an issue:

1. Make sure the issue has not been fixed in the
latest version:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/issues/list?q=label:Milestone-

Release0.7.8

What’s the problem? The GlobalMenu PPA, which supports jaunty, intrepid and hardy but not karmic, and it only has version 0.7.5. You could build version 0.7.8 from source, but when I tried to build it I immediately went into dependency hell. Luckily I discovered Issue 524: PPA for Karmic on the GlobalMenu section of Google Code. Abhishek Dasgupta has managed to build packages for version 0.7.8 on his PPA, although only for karmic.

If you’re running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala getting the updated GlobalMenu is easy. Open a terminal and run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:abhidg/ppa

That will not only add Abhishek’s PPA to your sources.list but also get the GPG signing key for it. Let’s update your available package information with

sudo apt-get update

If you already have GlobalMenu installed you should see the Update Manager icon in your notification to let you know that there’s an update available. Just click that icon and follow the normal steps for applying updates.

If you don’t have GlobalMenu installed yet and want to get it add the repo with the above command and update your package info. Once the apt-get update is completed run this command:

sudo apt-get install gnome-globalmenu

Then add the GlobalMenu panel applet to your panel and enjoy having menus for your application windows in one place and not on each window. Just remember, Firefox and OpenOffice.org, as well as any apps that need administrator privileges (like Synaptic), won’t use GlobalMenu.

If you want to follow the bug I was filing that prompted this post it’s Issue 548: Wrong app title shown for Epiphany/Webkit in Ubuntu Karmic.

Updated 25 November: If you aren’t sure if you really want to get the upgrade you can read the release notes, although they haven’t completely updated the docs for version 0.7.8 yet. There are some really nice updates in version 0.7.8 from 0.7.5 so I heartily recommend getting the upgrade.