For some reason, this took me forever to figure out, so I’m posting it here.

Let’s say that you, like me, are an avid Ubuntu user who refuses to be dragged kicking and screaming into Unity-land, instead choosing to go completely old-school and run WindowMaker. However, you want a nice application menu. Here’s what you can do:

Grab the “xdg_menu” perl script from here.

Run the following code (in the directory you downloaded the file):

chmod +x xdg_menu
sudo cp xdg_menu /usr/local/bin
sudo apt-get install libxml-parser-perl

Next, open up WindowMaker Preferences, scroll over to the menu-editing screen, and drag a “Generated Submenu” bar over to your menu and rename it whatever you want by double clicking on it. In the “Command” field, enter “xdg_menu”. Save and you’re all set.