We have been working on Unity much lately, but we cant forget our favourite DE – Gnome. Speaking of Gnome, we would like to present you a cool application menu for your Ubuntu desktops – Cardapio. This app-menu is really light, cool, usable and makes things straight forward. Cardapio can work in two modes: as a panel applet (in which case it is an alternative to Gnome’s application menu applet) or as a stand-alone launcher (in which case it is an alternative to the simplest use-cases of Gnome Do, Synapse etc). It has a beautiful gtk-native interface and includes plugins for performing inline searches of Files (via Tracker), Software Center, Google, Wikipedia, and much more !

Install

Use the following PPA to install Cardapio on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 -

sudo apt-get install ppa:cardapio-team/unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cardapio

and done. Take a look -

Usage Details

Panel Applet

To use as a panel applet, simply add it as usual : Right-click the panel, select “Add to panel”, then choose “Cardapio” and now you can remove the default App menu.

File Searching

To search for files in your computer using Cardapio, you need to install Tracker 0.8.7 or above. To install it on Ubuntu -

sudo apt-get install tracker

Then be sure to run the tracker preferences tool (just type “Search and Indexing” in Cardapio), change the settings to your personal preference, and restart your computer. Afterwards, activate the File Search plugin in Cardapio’s preferences window!

Launcher

To use as a launcher instead, make sure Cardapio is not used as an applet first, then run:

cardapio hidden

Thats it for now. For any queries regarding this or any other regarding Ubuntu/Linux, our forum is always open.

Njoy !