Why can't I see the menubar in some applications?

Question

I don't run gnome-panel normally. Most menubars work correctly. However, with wxMaxima and Audacity, they are not showing. When I start gnome-panel and add an appmenu, I can see the menus again.

Without panel:

With panel:

I get no relevant errors when I run from a terminal.

Why does this happen and what could I do to fix it? Against which package would I file this if this is a bug?

Answer 1

I have now reported this as a bug.

The work around is to edit ~/.bashrc by opening your home folder, pressing Ctrl+H and double clicking the file '.bashrc' to open it in the text editor. Add the following line to the file:

export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0

That only works for launching the program using the terminal. To fix the menu items, use the method outlined in the answer to Is it possible to make indicator-appmenu ignore a specific application?.

I eventually got it to work by creating a bash script to run the program with UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0.

#!/bin/bash
export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0
/path/to/executable

and then editing the command in the application launcher to:

bash /path/to/bash/script