Gnome Global Menu gives you a menu bar for the active application in a gnome panel like Mac OS X has it. This saves you some vertical screen space since the menu is removed from the application window.

It works fine, but only for GTK applications. That doesn’t sound so bad, but my main applications, firefox and openoffice, are not genuine GTK applications. This means that their menu is still shown in the application window itself. Too bad.

A clear description of the installation is on the project install page. The only flaw on there is that you need to import the GPG key before you reload the repository list.

After the installation you need to add the global menu applet toyour gnome panel and right click it to open the preferences. There you can enable the global menu.

It kills the menu in the window and puts in it an applet in a Gnome panel. The idea is stolen from Apple, but it’s a good idea I think. It removes the completely useless line in each window. Now all that has to be removed ins the titlebar, then I’ll be even more happy with the interface.

Now the weak thing: I haven’t tried the global menu yet. I don’t want to kill my Ubuntu immediately after installing Intrepid. I want to create a VM with Intrepid and try it out there. It will take some time, but I’ll post the result here.