Tales of 2d Unity

[Dave Hunt]

Hi,

I did some playing with a flash drive installation of Ubuntu 12.04, as 
released on 05-April, and had the best Unity-2d session yet, though did 
manage to crash the shell 3 times.  With each shell crash, I could have 
the shell automatically relaunch.  All crashes are reported in launchpad.

When my system starts, it automatically logs in as the user Ubuntu.  Orca 
is supposed to start on login, but this does not seem to happen, though, 
perhaps, it is attempted?  I always have to start Orca manually, after 
waiting for the complete desktop to be present.  When Orca is fully 
running, I discover that the shell had crashed, and have the bug report 
form available, with the 'close' and 'relaunch' buttons.  When I hit 
'relaunch, I can use the pre-loaded browser to fill the form, and 
continue.  From this point, the shell restarts, and appears to run as 
expected.  That is, I have access to the menus at all times, The dash and 
launcher seem to keep wirking.  I even added some items to the launcher, 
and their shortcuts persist.  I tried to use the heads-up display to find 
something on my hard drive, which is mounted in the '/media' directory, 
(confirmed by directory listing in terminal).  I believe a single press 
and release of the 'alt' key is how one is supposed to do this?  It 
resulted in a Unity shell crash, again, filed, using aport, and launchpad. 
The Unity shell relaunched and was usable, again, until I shut the system 
down normally.

My experience with browsing attempts in the hud does lead me to another 
question.  In my installed Trisquel system, I have a 'network' place, that 
shows me the other machines on my local network, and lets me login, using 
sftp.  I get a nice Nautilus display of the directories I'm allowed to 
see, with cut, copy, paste, and so on, options, as if these sites were 
local folders.  I've never found a way to see these things in Unity, past 
or present.  Anyone know how to do this?

I'm not sure whether I'm ready to turn this machine into a pangalin just 
yet, but I'm feeling a lot better about Unity-2d than I did yesterday at 
this time.  A switch may be the easiest and best way to keep my 
accessibility stack current.  Trisquel's 6 months behind, though, solid. 
Maybe I can run Classic Gnome, in 12.04, and have the best option?


Cheers,



Dave