Unable to hide top menu bar on secondary monitor

[iGadget]

In Ubuntu 11.04 (without running Unity) there was no menu bar at the top of my secondary display. This is exactly what I (and I figure most people) want when e.g. presenting.

What happens in 11.10: the top menu is shown on the secondary monitor as well, even when using LibreOffice in presentation mode. And there's no way to hide it!
This makes Ubuntu 11.10 unusable for a lot of scenarios, including business. This keeps me from upgrading to 11.10 for my business laptop and it would prevent me from using 12.04 (and recommending it to others!) if this is not fixed by then.

[iGadget (igadget)]

Not sure if it made any difference, but I just installed the libreoffice-presenter-console package (which unfortunately still doesn't work on 11.10, see Bug #824466) and when I tried again, the top menu bar was not displayed on top of the presentation any more (I also removed and re-attached the secondary monitor in the mean time, so maybe that has influenced the system as well?).

So it seems this issue isn't happening every time.

[iGadget (igadget)]

...and perhaps this bug should be renamed to 'Top menu bar on secondary display is sometimes on top when it shouldn't be'?

[Matthew Libersky (liberskym)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

The developers might want some more information, but your description is relatively thorough so I'll confirm this.
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Ubuntu Bug Squad volunteer triager
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

[Mossroy (mossroy)]

This is very annoying when watching a video on the secondary screen (with XBMC in my case) :
- if XBMC has the focus, the menu bar does not appear
- but if I use another application on the primary screen, the menu bar appears above the video of the secondary screen

I'd be interested in any workaround

[Andreas Rieck (andreas-4rieck)]

My current workaround for this bug is, to bring a window "allways on top" on my secondary monitor.
This seems preventing the unity top menu bar for beeing visible on top of a running "full screen" application.

For single windows (applications) like VMware player, it is simple to configure. Just right click on a window title bar and stick
this window "allways on top" within the settings. Then change this window to full screen mode.
However for some applications like LibreOffice Presentations, it is more tricky, because a full screen presentation (F5) open
a child window which is not automatically "allways on top", even if configured in LibreOffice settings.

This can be workaround'ed by using compizconfig-settings-manager (/usr/bin/ccsm) if installed.
start CCSM
- Navigate to section "Window Management"
- enable "Window Rules" plugin
- define a "Above" rule for your windows you want to have allways on top
  for example if you want VMware player, VMware workstation and the LibreOffice 3.4 presenter window classes
  always on top, then the "Above" rule is:
  (class=Vmplayer) | (class=Vmware) | (class=LibreOffice 3.4)