I just found a workaround to have the maxima menu correctly appear and
disable the indicator-appmenu just for texmacs with qt

QT_X11_NO_NATIVE_MENUBAR=1 texmacs

makes it so the menu appears in the the window, and correctly displays it.

Hope this helps someone.  This is great for me, since I liked the qt
version more. Also, the new pdf-renderer does have transparency in the
pdf exported in the qt version.

Peace.
-Adrián.

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 9:56 PM, Adrian S. <address@hidden> wrote:
> I just wanted to share my experiences compiling TeXmacs in Ubuntu 13.10.
>
> For installation in Ubuntu 13.10, I was not sure what to install, so I
> followed the dependencies in the package texmacs-src (which is for
> 1.0.18), which are:
>
> autotools-dev
> cdbs (>= 0.4)
> debhelper (>= 7.0)
> ghostscript
> guile-1.8-dev
> imagemagick
> ispell
> libfreetype6-dev
> libimlib2-dev
> libjpeg-progs
> libltdl-dev
> libqt4-dev
> librsvg2-bin
> libtiff-tools
> libx11-dev
> libxt-dev
> netpbm
> quilt
> r-base-core (>= 2.0)
> x11proto-core-dev
> xfig
>
> From these, I think r-base-core and xfig are not really needed. The
> packages listed ones allow it to compile, however:
>
> The configure script found guile2, and tried to compile against it.
> Aparently TeXmacs does not work with guile2, and needs guile1.8...
> After putting guile1.8 and guile1.8-dev, all compiled nicely.
>
> Then the newer version of ubuntu uses Maxima 5.30, which is
> incompatible with TeXmacs.  Previous versions of Maxima work just
> fine.
>
> A long time ago, I had asked a problem regarding the menu created when
> one starts a Maxima session. What is supposed to happen is that when
> one starts a Maxima session, one should see a new entry en the top
> menu saying "Maxima" and inside of which there are several options
> about operations that can be performed inside the session. Compiling
> the X version of texmacs (with the --disable-qt option) works just
> fine. However, the compiled Qt version of texmacs does not create the
> new menu.  At first I thought that this was TeXmacs fault, but then I
> notice that the binary qt version in Windows does create the menu.
> After a bit of digging, I realized that this is a Unity problem in
> Ubuntu. The problem is solved by removing the package
> "indicator-appmenu" in Ubuntu.
>
> This removes the Apple-like "global menu", which is common for all
> applications. This method is probably not the best way to do it,
> because if affects all applications; but is the only workaround that I
> have found (Other tricks like using "UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 texmacs", or
> using "APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH=1 texmacs" did not work)
>
> The package sage still uses a modified version of the Python plugin
> that has several problems, but is now able to plot graphics, which was
> missing for a while.
>
> The new version of sage also shows some annoying symbols due to using
> unicode , but it is a somewhat minor, though annoying, problem. I will
> take a look to see if there is an easy fix to at least that. I
> suggested a version of the sage plugin, but was not included.
>
> I must say that the SVN version is impressive, and the improvements
> done for the beamer style, and for the exportation of documents with
> the beamer style to PDF  are extraordinary.
>
> I am very happy with TeXmacs. I appreciate all the terrific work that
> is being done.
>
> I wonder if there is some work in the Mathemagix plugin, to see a bit
> what we should aim to regarding writing plugins.
>
> Hope this notes are useful to someone else.
>
> Peace.
> -Adrián.