Q: How do I get rid of the global menus in the Unity environment?

Answer

Advanced Users Only While the information in here works under certain circumstances, there is no guarantee it will work in future versions. Please use caution when editing your dotfiles, and be sure you know how to use the Athena Terminal Session login session to recover from dotfile problems.

For Gtk+ applications, including Terminal, Text Editor, Document Viewer, etc, you can control whether they use the native menubar or not by means of the UBUNTU_MENUPROXY environment variable. If this is set to an empty string, new applications started from that shell will have their normal menubars in the application. Bash users can put export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= (note the trailing equals sign) in their _/.basrc.mine; tcsh users can put setenv UBUNTU_MENUPROXY in /.cshrc.mine.

Firefox and Thunderbird use a system extension to use the global menubar, and this cannot be removed or disabled in the cluster environment. Private workstation owners can remove the firefox-globalmenu and thunderbird-globalmenu packages.

Other applications (e.g. Java-based GUIs such as MATLAB) are unaffected by the Unity transition.

See Also

• Java Landing Page