Testing unity-session in 18.04

You can remove gnome3 if you like and install unity-session as a stand alone but I suggest we can test them side by side. Because I have lots of hardware I can do both. There are no official ISOs with standalone unity-session on them. There may be in the future be we mainly want to gauge unity-session behaviour and stability in the early stages of development. Sometimes systemd will take some time to finish boot and if you have automatic updates on in software&updates then it will take time for official boot to finish. So set ‘check for automatic updates’ to ‘never’ and this will save network time
.
Regards…

There are 2 unofficial standalone Ubuntu-Unity ISOs at Sourceforge under the name Unity7sl
here.
One based on 17.10 stable and the other based on 18.04 development branch (or Testing).

Why not use them to cut down the bandwidth?

Why are people discussing some random unofficial thing here?

In more than one topic?

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There is a testing unity7 during 18.04 cycle thread in Dekstop category and another in Quality category. Will Cooke suggested to me open a unity-session testing on 18.04 thread in Quality. Apparently they haven’t been merged yet. As for Chanath and his endless postng of unity7 ISO link ?? is beyond my control . Could you ask popey to look into it.?

Regards…

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Chanath

The point here is to test unity-session in a traditional manner as I have prescribed, in the method that we use at U+1, that unity-session be tested side by side with gnome3. If you want to post links to your ISOs on sourceforge then can you start another thread specifically for that ? If those ISO installs break then you can better guide persons where to get help to fix them.

Regards…

Can other people confirm or reproduce possible misbehaviour with two repeatedly
opened instance of Nautilus ? I reported about this in previuosly mentioned trucking bug.

When a desktop launcher uses ‘DBusActivatable=true’, it will skip exec line and send a signal to to dbus to launch an application. On Unity for some reason dbus-activation is failing and causing time out.

Workaround:

  1. sudo apt-get install gksu
  2. gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop

And then comment out DBusActivatable=true like this
#DBusActivatable=true

  1. save and exit. Kill nautilus. nautilus -q
  2. Now it will work.

But you should file a separate bug against Nautilus for this.

@khurshid-alam

Thank you for the workaround.

I filled a separate bug against Nautilus as you advised.

Spoted another small glitch in “unity-session”.
“Show my login name in the menu bar” option is not working.

Hi Khurshid,

One of the members of U+1 team suggested file manager ‘nemo’. Is there a way we can fix bugs with nemo? Are you against this? Would it beak any other work you are doing?

Regards…

Actually I was thinking using Nemo for 18.10 and beyond. Nemo wouldn’t break anything and works fairly well with Unity (though it has some cinnamon dependencies). Nautilus is deeply integrated with Unity. With Nemo it is also possible to make it integrated in similar way, but that means much more work for us. Since 18.04 will be LTS, I think we shouldn’t make this type drastic changes for LTS cycle.

Where has this discussion has started? I would like to see the the reasoning behind Nemo as default file manager in LTS.

Hi Khurshid,

here is link : https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2375537

and I started a new thread.

regards…

I agree with Kurshid that for 18.04 we don’t need drastic changes that could possible affect stability or would need a lot of work for adjustment. For me better approach is to fix as much glitches or misbehaviours with current set of applications from “parent” distro and to get as smooth and stable experience as possible.

Fo example I like to use LIM (local integrated menu) but won’t have problem with single vertical menu for proposed Nautilus (patched by Kurshid). For me Gnome “approach” with single app menu on the topbar is not best experience, but in LIM variant in Unity such single menu is somehow exceptable. Of course that horizontal menu form old 16.04 Nautilus looks better but i’m willing to accept small annoyance with 18.04 Nautilus version if everything is working as expected.

If for some reason we need to reconsider alternative option, then Nemo is good proposal for future releases . But maybe we should also consider Caja file manager from Mate desktop or even whole their set o system application if we need more “traditional” approach with horizontal menu that looks better in Unity. To me it seems that they could play well together with either LIM or global menu variant of Unity. For all future releases interface consistency is priority but for 18.04. maybe there is just not enough time to achieve this.

But that is just a proposal from users perspective not taking into account all hard work for such adjustments.

Thanks for the links.

Nautilus will work even without my patch. But people who uses LIM in Unity (& I think it’s very popular feature) won’t be too happy because LIM simply can’t work without no-csd patch.

Actually I found two solutions for this. I proposed this here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2017-October/005273.html

There are going discuss on this week meetings on #ubuntu-desktop.

Has anyone problem switching keyboard layouts ? None of the combinations I tried seems to work. It works only from the icon by mouse-clicking.
I tried with ibus, no ibus, Unity settings, dconf-editor to no avail.
The only workaround I found is through xkb (terminal command) but the top bar icon remain unchanged.

Keyboard shortcuts layouts are broken. But it’s broken for all sessions, not a Unity specific issue.

In my case keyboard layouts are not working in Unity only.
The default Super+Space it is working in GNOME.

What about Shift+Super+Space ?

Not broken here. It appears very functional.

Neither. I tested a lot of combinations, non of them worked.
It’s a typical 17.10 to 18.04 installation, fresh and without any weird changes, from my side. Unity is working alongside GNOME without problems so far, the only one is with the keyboard layout switch.

EDIT:
Now I saw that I cannot login to wayland session. Maybe it is related?
It keeps throw me in x11 session no matter what I choose. I suspect a hardware conflict(?) I don’t have any extra drivers installed. Nvidia [GeForce GT 430] [10de:0de1] on nouveau.

EDIT2: (Solution)
Nothing related to wayland , Nvidia, nouveau etc.
I’ve had 4 sessions in total. Three inside /usr/share/xsessions (symlink included) and one in /usr/share/wayland-sessions/
I (re)moved them, also removed the symlink (ubuntu.destkop). Then I renamed unity.desktop (session) to ubuntu.desktop. Now the keyboard layout shortcut is working.

Now if anyone can tell me what happened, it would be appreciated. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Basically the solution was to remove the ubuntu.destkop symlink and rename the unity.desktop to ubuntu.desktop as far as I can understand. The other distinct (GNOME) sessions have nothing to do with this.

Shortcuts working for me in both Unity and “Ubuntu on X” session. ALT+TAB, Super+Numbers, CTRL+ALT+T, Super+TAB, all seem to work. Can’t test in Wayland, because nVidia. I should install 18.04 on a Dell D610 as well.