Why doesn't Squish work correctly on Ubuntu 11.

Ubuntu 11 ships with the Unity desktop by default. This desktop system takes a macOS-like approach with a single menubar at the top of the screen rather than associated with each application. One of the things the Ubuntu developers have done to achieve this is to patch all the GUI libraries shipped with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, many many applications—including the Squish IDE — are broken by these patches, with the result that no menubar is shown at all. See for example, Ubuntu bug 618587 and Eclipse bug 330563.

A workaround is to set the following environment variable: UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0. (This workaround is used by the SQUISHDIR/squishide script which runs the SQUISHDIR/bin/ide/squishide application, but obviously if you run the application directly you must set the environment variable yourself.)