Ubuntu 12.04 and unity.

[Michael Butash]

Precise 12.04 now, 64bit.

It's not so much about installing 1 or 10, it's about not a one of the 
"next-gen" desktops has been ever tested with more than one framebuffer 
or very large ones it seems.  I'm pretty sure the problems are not 
apparent in a *simple* dual monitor, single framebuffer config (i.e. 
nvidia twinview), but rather when you have DISPLAY:0.0 and DISPLAY:0.1 
to the system.  Compiz and the ATI drivers I'm reasonably sure is the 
root of all evil, and 5760x1200 x2 displays.

Unity with 12.04, and the unity plugin itself can somewhat deal with 
multiple framebuffers now, but nautilus still causes this lovely "white 
screen" effect on my second monitor set when launched.  Gnome-Shell just 
freezes when logging in, getting a wallpaper, but nothing more before 
having to flip tty's and restart lightdm.  Cinnamon's task bars won't 
render at all.  Kde was so-so, but most apps had issues with the 
displays between the giant render modes.

Cinnamon's half-broken state is more or less what I use, overlaying awn 
and cairo to make it usable, but when I get a chance I've been meaning 
to put lxde on there to see how it fares.

I really hoped when they announced on canonical's blog a good 6 months 
or more ago now they'd finally bought their dev a 6-head display to test 
with maybe things would finally get better, but apparently not.  I'd 
love what and how they're actually testing with it as I'm still only 
sorta working here, and only because I have worked around everything 
that defaults to simply broken.

Sadly I'd tried win7 for the first time on a native dual-head display 
with separate framebuffers the other day, and had a bunch of quirky 
issues with mremote and some others dragging between displays.  Guess 
Linux isn't the only one not getting it, but at least I didn't have to 
pay 200 bucks for the priviledge of debugging the os for the vendor.

-mb


On 04/12/2012 10:00 AM, Dazed_75 wrote:
> MichaelB, what release are you running?  I've installed something like 8
> Desktop Managers (DMs) on my ubuntu 11.10.  I did this for a
> presentation I did on installing additional DMs.
>
> The problems I've seen are a few extra programs installed for the
> lightweight DMs, I now get the xubuntu splash at some time in startup
> and shutdown regardless of which DM I actually use, and some of the DMs
> don't play well with older projectors.  Cinnamon works great.
>
> This thread is really about 12.04 and I have not tried these things on
> 12.04.
>
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 8:52 AM, Michael Butash <michael at butash.net
> <mailto:michael at butash.net>> wrote:
>
>     I wish that were the case for me - gnome3 won't even launch with
>     multiple framebuffers requiring me to drop to a tty and restart
>     lightdm to choose something else.  Cinnamon is broken on the same
>     display as well.  Sadly with the "new desktops", unity works the
>     best, which isn't saying much in the least.  It's like 2005 all over
>     again, hacking entirely around ui short-sightedness.
>
>     At this point the only thing gnome-ish left I can use is gedit and
>     gnome-terminal, even nautilus is still broken on multiple displays.
>     Other than that, avant-window-navigator and cairo-dock provide all
>     my task and tray management.
>
>     -mb
>
>
>
>     On 04/11/2012 09:56 PM, Stephen wrote:
>
>         Well while i may hate unity, getting gnome2/3 working is a cakewalk
>         now. install the one you want. logout and pick the one you want.
>
>         you do end up wasting space with unity still installed, but at
>         least it works.
>
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> --
> Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry
>
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