MenuLibre Now Available for Ubuntu 13.04

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MenuLibre, the advanced menu editor, has been upgraded to provide better international support and stability. Best of all, MenuLibre is now available for Ubuntu 13.04. Now it just needs translations…

What’s New in the latest MenuLibre?

  • Better international support.  All application strings are now exposed for translation, and translated strings for each launcher are displayed by default.
  • Improved launcher loading.  The methods used to read and write launcher settings have been improved, resulting in better accuracy and improved speed.
  • Fixed Python installer. Previous versions of MenuLibre have been known to not work for anything but Ubuntu. This has finally been fixed. Package maintainers, go!
  • And… lots of obsolete translations.  Unfortunately, revealing all the untranslated strings means that every translation is now out-of-date.  That’s where the translators come in!

Translating MenuLibre

MenuLibre is hosted on Launchpad, which means translations are a breeze.  To create or modify a translation, just head over to https://translations.launchpad.net/menulibre.  Select the translation to modify, and get started!

Translations will also now be synchronized daily, meaning each new MenuLibre release will contain the latest updates for each translation. If you have questions regarding Launchpad translations, check out the help section here.

PPA Updates

There have been some updates since the last time I wrote about MenuLibre. In particular, builds are now available for Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, and 13.04. Additionally, two PPAs are now available.

MenuLibre Stable will contain frequent package updates for updated, stable software.  This is the one most people will want.  To install it, run the following commands in a terminal window.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:menulibre-dev/devel
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install menulibre

Perhaps you’re the adventurous type, and you want something a bit more bleeding-edge? The MenuLibre Daily PPA is now available. This archive will contain daily updates to the code and translations, making it a great testing ground for what’s next.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:menulibre-dev/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install menulibre

What’s Next?

The next step in the evolution of MenuLibre is full menu-editing (similar to Alacarte) support for traditional application launchers (Gnome 2, MATE, LXDE, Xfce).  This will position MenuLibre a viable replacement for Alacarte in all projects once complete.  But why stop there?

Do you have any suggestions for the next version of MenuLibre?  Interface refinements, feature requests, or bite-sized bugs that are annoying but not worth reporting?  Let me know in the comments!  And thanks for using MenuLibre!