How To Get A Global Menu In MATE Desktop

MATE GlobalMenu is an applet forked from the old GNOME2 GlobalMenu project, which adds a global menu to the MATE panel.

Mate GlobalMenu is based off the upstream GNOME GlobalMenu v0.7.10 and it only supports GTK2 applications, so don't expect Firefox, LibreOffice or Qt applications to work with this, but it's nevertheless an useful addition to the MATE desktop, especially for small screens.

The applet comes with various options:

• show the active application icon and/or application title
• display the menu both on the panel and inside the application window;
• a "tiny" mode;
• enable/disable F10 key to access the menu;
• more.

According to its GitHub page, the applet is supposed to work with the latest stable MATE v1.4 and I can confirm that it works as I've tested it with Linux Mint 14 MATE (with MATE 1.4). According to some of our readers (see the comments), it does not work with Linux Mint 13 due to some missing dependencies.

Install MATE GlobalMenu in Ubuntu / Linux Mint MATE / LMDE

MATE GlobalMenu comes with a repository available for LMDE which works with Ubuntu 12.10 or Linux Mint 14 MATE (it doesn't work with Linux Mint 13, at least not with the default repositories). However, the repository is unfortunately only available for 64bit! To add it and install MATE GlobalMenu, use the following commands:

wget http://jas.gemnetworks.com/jasmineaura.gpg.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://jas.gemnetworks.com/debian debian main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mate-globalmenu.list
echo "deb-src http://jas.gemnetworks.com/debian debian main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mate-globalmenu.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-globalmenu

Arch Linux users can install MATE GlobalMenu via AUR.

For Ubuntu 12.04 / Linux Mint 13 or other Linux distributions, you'll have to compile it from source. See the MATE GlobalMenu GitHub page for more info and source code.

Important:

Once installed, reload the MATE panels:

killall mate-panel

Then add the MATE GlobalMenu applet to the panel and enable the applet using the following command:

mateconftool-2 --set /apps/mate_settings_daemon/gtk-modules/globalmenu-mate-panel --type bool true

And then log out and log back in to avoid some crashes that might occur (those errors only show up when enabling the applet, after the logout it should work as expected) and also to get the applet preferences to work, or else you'll get an empty preferences dialog.

thanks to lffl.org for the info!