Comment 6 for bug 911123

> Shall we replace the menu with buttons (see attached) to match other dialogs ?

It might be interesting to first figure out why the menu doesn't show up for you on Ubuntu, and compare it to other linux distros and Inkscape on Windows as well. Attaching a screenshot with plain (Raleigh) Gtk+ theme, showing the content of the 'File' menu of the docked dialog.

> This still seems valid, we should remove this message about
> setting this preference since it doesn't work.

Agreed - it might be useful though to try to first figure out
- why the message is there in the first place
- what happens/happened with the "other" debug dialog you mentioned
- whether the hidden preference referred to is relevant today, on which platforms, and
- how it needs to be defined within the current prefs structure
- …

I'm against doing a quick change without checking the background/history of the dialog and its intended (original) purpose.

Some quick search results:
> You might have noticed the DebugDialog, which is found
> from the View/Messages... menuitem. It is a trivial text
> window, whose only current purpose is to catch g_log(),
> g_message(), g_warning(), etc messages, and
> print them in the GUI, instead of writing to the terminal.
>
> While Linux users might not consider this exciting, this
> will hopefully be a benefit to Win32 users. On Windows,
> that extra DOS console window popping up can be a
> terrible annoyance.
>
> So it is turned on by default on Win32, and can be turned
> on for other platforms by setting
>
> dialogs.debug redirect="1"
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/4867>

«Debugging output can now be redirected from console to the new Messages window (open via a command in the View menu). This redirection is on by default on Windows. »
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.40#Interface_and_usability>

>> Look in the View/Messages dialog. Use "Capture" and see what it
>> emits. These are the same messages that a person would see
>> on Unix.
>>
> Actually, that is not correct. What "capture" does is show you all of the
> debug messages that you output with g_message(), g_warning(), and
> g_error(). Nobody should be using printf() anyway.
>
> We made this dialog for us Win32 guys who are cursed with bad
> consoles. Damn those lazy arrogant Linux guys! ^^ :-)
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/17875/focus=17878>

… to be continued.