Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Shell Global Menu & Gwyddion

Gwyddion is a program for processing STM image data. It's open source and cross-platform and very useful for researchers like myself.

Updating Ubuntu to 11.04 however brings with it the Unity shell, which happens to break Gwyddion (among other things), by hiding its menus.

A simple fix for this is to launch Gwyddion with the terminal command:

nanobaz@Ubuntu:~$ UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= gwyddion

thus bringing back the standard menu bar! That's not a typo by the way, it's

UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=<blank><space>gwyddion

This also works for any other program, and if you want to disable the app menu globally, use the command (as su):

nanobaz@Ubuntu:~$ echo "export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/81ubuntumenuproxy

The only flaw in this fix is that I can't figure out how to bind this command into a launcher, or change the default method of calling Gwyddion in the GUI to include the first term.

Source