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

[Brady Merriweather]

I figured that after you mentioned the drivers were not supported your card has been marked by Nvidia as legacy. The opensource driver will work, but 3D exceleeation wont work. So unity won't work, just unity 2D. You can visit http://www.nvidia.com/page/legacy.htmland see if your model is listed

Brady Merriweather 
http://www.about.me/Merriweather 

On May 11, 2011, at 12:38 AM, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> -- 
> Ubuntu-us-dc mailing list
> Ubuntu-us-dc at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-dc