Fixing Unity

[Phillip Waclawski]

Thank you for this information. I attended a talk at SCALE 10X that was called "retrognome" that went through a list of addons to make Unity more usable. The interesting part was someone that works on Unity from Canonical was in the audience. He got very defensive at one point and we tried to explain that we are not opposed to change per se, but many of these changes make it harder to do work, and the Unity team seems to have deliberately removed our ability to CHOOSE to keep some of the "old features". 
A bit of a disconnect between the developers and a significant chunk of the users. 
Phil W. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Jim March" <1.jim.march at gmail.com> 
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>, "Main PLUG discussion list" <plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us> 
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2012 4:06:53 PM 

OK. So I hate Unity with a passion. Sorry. I'm not going to argue 
about it, it just isn't my thing. 

I can deal with Gnome3 set to classic mode - while the menus are a bit 
annoying plus there's that whole "hold ALT to modify the toolbar 
stuff", there's some quite decent stability enhancements that make the 
nuisance parts worth it. 

The question then is, do you want to go with Linux Mint 12 (which is 
basically Ubuntu Oneiric tweaked to no-Unity plus restricted 
codecs/players) or do you run "real Ubuntu Oneiric" and hand-tweak 
Unity out yourself? 

Well the answer to me has come down to "tweak Oneiric". 

1) Mint 12 just "felt unstable". Hybernate-to-disk didn't work (across 
two machines) and other small glitches popped up here and there. 
Nothing show-stopper but still, very obviously some unpolished bits. 

2) The first time I installed Mint 12 (32bit) I got 
whole-disk-encryption working via the scripts at: 

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/344 

For reasons I don't understand at all, it stopped working. I tried it 
in 32bit, failed, tried again in 64bit when I recently scored a more 
potent machine (more memory for starters) and yet again, failure. This 
forced me into the "encrypted home folder" plan which is quite 
possibly where some of the glitches occurred - possibly including the 
hibernation fail. 

A few days ago I backed up and reinstalled clean from an Oneiric 64bit 
alternate install disk. I did the "anti-Unity" tweaks at: 

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/things-to-tweak-after-installing-ubuntu.html 

...to get "classic Gnome" running right, and they worked like a champ. 
The only thing that went wrong was, on one of the reboots LightDM 
failed completely and dumped me to a command prompt. But doing: 

sudo apt-get install gdm 

...and picking the GDM startup manager fixed that. (The instructions 
warn of problems with LightDM and sure enough, he's not kidding! I 
ignored that and it bit me in the butt.) 

I now have fastest, most stable full-on setup I've ever run. It starts 
up without Compiz but doing an ALT-F2 and "compiz --replace" gives me 
the eye candy when I want it. Cool. 

Starting with real Ubuntu you need to do the usual tweaks (medibuntu, 
load w32codecs or w64codecs, libdvdcss, flash player, extra gstreamer 
stuff, etc. but that's not a big deal. 

Random thoughts: 

For my needs, the breakover point at which 64bit is a good idea is 
3gigs RAM. I need to run WinXP virtualized (VirtualBox for now but 
since my latest lappy has hardware virt support in the CPU I'll switch 
soon). 64bit code is bulkier so with 2gigs RAM and 768megs assigned to 
the XP machine, RAM gets tight. With 32bit code, memory usage in more 
efficient. At 3gigs of real RAM I can run 64bit and assign 1gig to the 
XP VM with no problems. 

64bit still has "glitches". For example, to get Adobe Flash going you 
end up adding some 32bit libraries. Which is fine until you load 
Google Chrome, at which point it wants the 64bit version of said 
libraries. Ooops. This is solvable: the solution is to install the 
google .deb file at the command line: 

sudo dpkg -i googlesupplieddebname.deb (after CDing into the dir with 
the .deb file) 

...and watch for what it fails on. Load synaptic if you haven't already: 

sudo apt-get install synaptic 

...and use that to specifically load the 64bit versions of the 
libraries it's choking on. (Leave the 32bit versions in there so flash 
still works.) 

That said, the "64bit glitchies" are extremely minor and no trouble 
for anybody slightly Linux-experienced to cope with. For total Linux 
newbies OR those with 2gigs or less RAM I'm still recommending 32bit 
and I suspect Precise won't change that. 

Jim 
--------------------------------------------------- 
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us 
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: 
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20120210/4adde282/attachment.html>