[DC LoCo] Dis-Unity: An Update On My Adventures in Getting Unity to Work.

[Michael Haney]

Ok.  The proprietary Nvidia drivers will NOT allow me to use Unity at
all.  I reinstalled Natty, the 174 drivers were installed by default,
and the Unity desktop comes up blank with just the wallpaper.  The top
bar and dock do not appear, and the right-click menu comes up for just
a second then vanishes.  I have to manually shutdown the machine and
restart.  I can get into the Ubuntu Classic desktop just fine and its
3D accelerated using Compiz.

I went into Synaptic to see if there were other drivers.  I saw a 180
driver, so I downloaded that and after it was done went into
Additional Drivers and below the 174 drivers was a listing for
Nvidia-Current, and the Experimental Open-Source 3D drivers.  The
Nvidia-Current have the exact same issue as the 174 drivers.  The
Ubuntu boot splash screen is white and corrupted, and Unity will not
display correctly.  Just shows the wallpaper, but the Ubuntu Classic
desktop works fine but its not accelerated.  Additional Drivers says
its installed but not in use.  I tried the experimental drivers next.
The boot splash screen seems to look ok off and on in the few times I
rebooted.

The key thing is I can now see the Unity UI, or at least part of it.
I see the main top panel, and the Dock bar, but none of the icons in
the Dock display.  Its just a dark bar there and when I move my mouse
there I see the mouseover text telling me what is there.  Another
thing I've noticed is that I don't have to muck with the xorg.conf
file to make my monitor show the right resolution.  I can use 1024x768
with the experimental 3D drivers working.

With the experimental drivers I also have full Compiz desktop
compositing in the Ubuntu Classic UI.  I didn't have that with
Nvidia's proprietary drivers.  So, hopefully by 11.10 these issues
will have been ironed out and Unity will work correctly with the
community developed Nvidia 3D drivers.  My graphics card is older, its
a 8x AGP Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 w/256 DDR RAM.  The community 3D
drivers are actually FASTER than the proprietary drivers I used in the
past.  The Gnome UI and the entire Ubuntu Classic desktop in general
seems much more responsive.  Chromium loads pages much faster than it
did before and I don't have massive lag when scrolling through iGoogle
and Gmail like before.  It seems whatever has been causing a lot of
performance overhead in previous versions of Ubuntu is gone from
Natty.

After poking around in Unity I decided to go and stick with the
classic UI for now.  Not just because of the Dock, but because Unity
needs work.  Its not easy to find the applications you want anymore.
I like how Ubuntu does it in Gnome 2.x, where the app launchers are in
a menu sorted by categories and easy to find.  Now you need to hunt
for what your looking for in Unity or you need to know the name of the
app your looking for to type it in.  Its a very counter-intuitive UI
and I think it still needs some serious work.  Unity as a UI for
newbies to Linux is NOT ready for prime time.  If anything it will
turn them off of Ubuntu.

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking
of morality by religion." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and
politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place
for it in the endeavor of science. " ~ Carl Sagan

Visit My Site:  http://sites.google.com/site/thezorch/home-1
To Contact Me:
http://sites.google.com/site/thezorch/home-1/zorch-central---contacts

Free Your PC from the Bondage of Windows http://www.ubuntu.com