Whisker Menu 1.5.0 was released yesterday, bringing new options for setting the background opacity and displaying your profile picture, customizable recently used limit and more, as well as quite a few bug fixes.

Whisker Menu is an alternative to the Xfce application menu that features a search function so you can easily find the application you want to launch. The menu also supports browsing apps by category, you can add applications to favorites and more. The menu is used by default in Linux Mint 15 Xfce.

The application was updated recently, getting a much requested feature: you can now open the menu using a keyboard shortcut (though you must add the keyboard shortcut manually - see below), along with other enhancements and fixes.

The tool allows you to quickly search for the application you want to launch or, if you don't know the application name, you can browse all the applications installed on the system by browsing through categories.

Kubuntu Netbook (10.10) finally got its application menu integration ready yesterday (turned off panel auto-hiding by default).

As you can see in the screenshot, it's not exactly the same like on Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 maverick Meerkat, but it's built on the same technologies.

The Kubuntu Nebtook "global menu" also works with GTK/GNOME applications (but for now you'll have to install some additional packages for this):

The Global Menu for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 has just been uploaded to a PPA (it's still building, but should be ready in a few minutes). The new "global menu" is called "Application Menu" and it can be installed in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx already (both in GNOME and KDE). Here's how.