Unity Going Forward

[Colin Law]

On 20 August 2012 00:30, Jason Warner <jason.warner at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi Colin -
>
> On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 6:08 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 17 August 2012 01:51, Jason Warner <jason.warner at canonical.com> wrote:
>> > ...
>> > But there is a cost to this decision. Unity 2D fit a very specific use
>> > case
>> > in very low-end and non-GPU accelerated hardware. By consolidating to
>> > Unity
>> > using LLVMpipe for this specific use case we expect to see some
>> > regressions
>> > in systems supported. This means that a certain class of hardware will
>> > no
>> > longer be supported to run Unity. Unity will run on all GPUs that
>> > support
>> > OpenGL 2.0. The earliest GPUs that meet this requirement are at least 5
>> > years old[1]. Even so, we know some subset of cards and hardware that
>> > could
>> > previously run Unity 2D will no longer be able to run Unity.
>>
>> A heads up to make sure that the case of dual monitors with i945
>> graphics chipset (and possibly others) has been considered.  That
>> chipset will only run 3d if the virtual desktop is less than 2048
>> pixels wide so when an external monitor is plugged in only unity-2d
>> will run at the moment.  If the external monitor is not plugged in
>> then 3d is ok.  Having removed unity-2d the software will have to cope
>> with plugging in the external monitor in some way.  Note that this is
>> an issue for laptops made only a few years ago (Toshiba Satellite for
>> example).
>
>
> Is there an bug for this? if not, please file one so we can track it.
> Thanks.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1039051

>
>>
>>
>> >
>> > For these cases, we are actively working on Unity running through
>> > LLVMpipe
>> > which is a work in progress. Unity through LLVMpipe is CPU bound which
>> > means
>> > systems with decently modern CPU architectures and non-GPU accelerated
>> > hardware should be able to run Unity. As I mentioned, this approach is a
>> > work in progress as we tweak the experience and effects to maximize the
>> > performance. We expect this to shake out over the rest of this cycle and
>> > bleed into 13.04 as well[2][3].
>>
>> Is it correct that at the moment a machine that will not run 2d will
>> not run at all after todays update?  This seems to be the case for me
>> at the moment, I see no unity shell on screen and in .xsession-errors
>> I see
>> compiz (unityshell) - Error: OpenGL 1.4+ not supported
>>
>> When can I expect llvmpipe to start working so I know whether to log bugs?
>
>
> The rought ETA is sometime just after FF, so adding some time for testing
> and shakeout, it might be closer to beta1.

I have submitted a bug for this too in order to track it.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1039155

It is unfortunate that unity-2d has been removed before the
replacement is available as now one of my test machines is out of
action for Quantal testing.  I can logon but then just get the
background image and no launcher or panel.

Colin