64 bit GnoMenu

GnoMenu is a fantastic project to get a main menu for Gnome that IMHO looks a little nicer than a plain menu system. Check it out:
While GnoMenu is primarily designed for Ubuntu (although it does have packages for other Gnome based distributions) the developers have only created a 32 bit DEB package.

Thankfully with a few changes to the source and the makefile 64 bit users can work around this issue with relative ease.

1. Download the latest source and extract it. You can use your home directory but you might find that if you need to compile other programs from source that it becomes a bit messy. I like to keep all my sources as well as personal programming projects in a Programs directory but feel free to organize however you like.

2. Make sure you have all the dependencies (found in README.txt). If you are running a regular install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and haven't deleted any of your python packages you can do this by opening a terminal and running:
sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-xlib deskbar-applet

3. Go to where you extracted the file. Open up MakeFile in a text editor and replace all instances of lib with lib64 (in gedit this is easily done with Ctrl+h).

4. Do the same with:
  • setup.py
  • src/bin/GnoMenu.py
  • src/lib/bonobo/GNOME_GnoMenu.server
5. Also rename the src/lib directory to src/lib64.

5b. Now I haven't tested this part as I don't need it but if you wish GnoMenu to integrate with AWN, Cairo-dock, Gnome-Do or XFCE4 you may have to make similar edits in the files contained in src/share/*/ (Best of luck).

6. Now your all set to compile. Go back to the main gnomenu directory and run the makefile. The easiest way to do this is go to the directory in a terminal and run:
sudo make install

It should now be selectable as a deskbar applet when you right click a panel. Enjoy a beautiful new and theme-able menu.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much. I'm not properly a nob with linux and I couldn't do it (never cross my mind rename the src/lib to src/lib64) and you can't find detailed information on how to do this as easy and explicit as what you have here. Bravo

Oliver Schmid said...

Thanks, and you're very welcome.

Anonymous said...

Thank you. This works great :)

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