Unity 7 Continuation - Call for Developers and Supporters!

Wow! It’s wonderful to see all of the responses from so many of you! I’ve since joined the team on Launchpad and I’m focusing a lot of my efforts in learning about and understanding the way Unity and its technologies work. I will be testing Unity 7 with Ubuntu 17.10 as well and through the 18.04 cycle as well, all the while I plan to gain enough understanding of the underlying code base to slowly make contributions when possible. I’m absolutely thrilled and impressed by the support all of you have shown, and grateful for it and the resources provided via links as well. I definitely recommend that anyone interested use/test Unity 7 on Ubuntu 17.10 and definitely spread the word if you see fit!

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Hi schyken, Hi All.

While I’ve also been using Ubuntu/Unity since the 12.04 days, I’m embarrassingly new to the contribution and testing side of things. Are there any tutorials or resources anyone could recommend that I can apply to Unity 7 testing?
I’m moving over to 17.10 and Unity7 on my daily driver laptop as we speak. Is the greater need bug reporting or tackling some bug fixes?

Credentials wise I’m a systems engineer by day, dabbling programmer by night. Can’t claim expertise in any one area but have dug around the HTML/CSS/JavaScript/C/JAVA/C++/SQL realm for so long I feel I can take a stab at things. Well my day job requires it, basically throwing me in harms way and asking me to “make it work”.

Unity - Live long and prosper.

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Try this out. Here.

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If I may, could you make unity available across distros, as Coprs, flatpaks, Debian packages, on OBS, etc (after patching it so it works with GNOME).

Cinnamon and Budgie devs did it on their end, thus ensuring that the DEs are available across distros, and more people can potentially use, abuse and contribute…

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I’m in :raising_hand_man:

Unity 7 - Ubuntu 18.04 LTS by Nick T, on Flickr

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I’m delighted to see so much enthusiasm to preserve Unity 7!

For those that don’t know me, I’m Martin Wimpress and I’ve been contributing to MATE Desktop for about 6 years and co-founded and lead the Ubuntu MATE project. So, I know a little something about preserving a desktop environment for those users who love it :wink: I’ll be honest, it is not glamorous work but it is a lot of fun and extremely rewarding. So I encourage those of you interested in contributing to Unity 7 to do so.

I’ve also seen the Unity 7 respin iso images based on 17.10 and they’re looking great. Would any of you be interested in working towards making an officially recognised Ubuntu Unity flavour? If so, let me know as I’d be up for helping guide you through that process. As a by-product I’d like to create some documentation that others interested in working towards an official Ubuntu flavour could use too.

Let me know your thoughts.

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Of course we know ( at least I know) who you are Martin. You, along with Popey, made the Ubuntu MATE an Official Flavor !
Your contribution, in any form, to Unity continuation is valuable and always appreciated. :+1:

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Hi everyone, I would love to lend a hand with this in whatever capacity - I’m out of a job because of a hernia so I can donate some time and a laptop or two to the cause for testing.

Also, I have to get this off my chest - I was the guy who e-mailed the podcast a week or two ago who said using Linux was like using a drug. When I said you can be an ass to people around you - I was about Unity (because I was sore about GNOME 2 and unwilling to accept change) and over time I ate a lot of humble pie. I’d like to give something back to a desktop environment that became solid and reliable and that I never gave a fair chance in my early days.

I have some experience with C#/Ruby/Python if there’s any light coding required - but I have to admit, I’ll need to research how to contribute that way. Any pointers? Thank all of you for your hard work and I look forward to seeing this!

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Hi Martin,

Great to see you here. And yes, we would love to get your help regarding Unity as official flavor. Atm, we are a small team and still figuring out how to progress step by step.

About the iso, are you talking about the iso that @dale-f-beaudoin created ? He (and others) already made a significant progress in this area and made an Unity.iso which works pretty well. See here

Also we set up a new mailing list. I am inviting you to join. https://launchpad.net/~unity7maintainers

Thanks.

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I can do no more than encourage. I am not a coder, simply a user. I’ve used Ubuntu for more than ten years and loved Unity. As someone said a good job has been done with Gnome but it’s not Unity. I hope that Unity can be made available as a desktop option into the future. Perhaps Unity 7 might evelove in Unity 9 and have an assured future.

Hi Khurshid,

Just for the record I did create the ISO which is here : https://mega.nz/#!4LZCkYwD!O3DuEpNiruvuO1SWSDvhFC6r_PDx3Xua6NCXNzSsibg

There are only few post installation problems but others have found it suitable for installation. There is another ISO at Mega that I had nothing to do with and also at sourceforge which I do not subscribe to nor do I recommend anyone download that ISO.

@peterdown54

As for unity9… I had discussed this possible upgrade with some ubuntu_forums_members and others. It would be just a straight-stack development jump for desktops only. It would also be only if Uubuntu (U-nity-ubuntu) were to become an official flavor. Atm we have decided to just stay focused with current version of unity7, make it stable for 18.04 and have it ready for those upgrading from default unity 16.04 to 18.04 . I encourage all testers to try and test gnome3 alongside unity as gnome3 will be default and many developers would appreciate our bug reports on gnome-session, gdm and wayland.

Regards…

When you say, Unity 7 respin iso images, are you mentioning the ones in Mega.nz or the ones in Sourceforge?

I can create a respin off (practically) any Ubuntu based, or Debian based distro without installing it, but I can’t code, so can’t change or maintain a package. Unity7N.iso at Mega.nz was done by me without installing the 17.10 Ubuntu (dev branch) at that time. It can be updated and upgraded to date, and also moved to 18.04 (dev branch) by changing the repo name to bionic. I’ve checked this few days ago, and it doesn’t break – one good thing about Unity 7!

I don’t know how an app package is created and what goes in there. I can test the created isos in one MBR (Lenovo) and two UEFI laptops (Asus and Medion).

Btw, I know, who you are and I have your Ubuntu-Mate too.

There is no discussion on Unity 7 and related matters in Ubuntu Forums Development section now. Every time Unity 7 is mentioned, the thread or the post is moved to chat and other places or the post is taken off and moved somewhere less significant. I’m not posting anything on Unity7 on 18.04 there.

@khurshid-alam too

Now that’s out of the way, if you and the group want Unity 7 to become an official flavour, the group has to create an Uubuntu iso and maintain that iso somewhere, most probably in sourceforge or ibiblio.org or nluug.org or some other place easily available for users, and where a download counter is. Also, the group has to have a separate website on Uubuntu. The Uubuntu has to have its own branding at the beginning. If that Uubuntu (or any other name) is a success, then the group can ask it to be brought in as an Ubuntu flavour. The Gnome, Mate or Budgie flavours etc, started that way.

The checking of Unity7 alongside Gnome-shell is completely another mater and is NOT going to bring any value to an Unity7 only distro, the future Ubuntu flavour. If the group is going to do work on making Unity7 (Uubuntu) an oficial flavour, the group has to concentrate ONLY on Unity7 on 18.04. Whether Gnome-shell would work well in 18.04 is someone else’s problem.

Chanath,

You did not read all my message.

Regards…

I suppose, I can say the same thing…

If the group is going to create an Uubuntu distro an official flavour, then the group must concentrate only on that, not about how Gnome-shell would fare – that would be looked after by the official developer team.

For example, checking how gnome-session, gdm etc work won’t help those, who created Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Budgie etc. If Uubuntu is a serious matter, then the main and the only focus must be on creating that Uubuntu distro. Otherwise, it’d be a no go.

Ask Martin Wimpress, David Mohommad how they went about it. Have look here, https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-remix-inception/ and here http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/ubuntu-mate-remix-course-become-official-flavour and here http://www.webupd8.org/2016/04/a-quick-look-at-budgie-remix-1604.html

Linux related websites start reviewing Uubuntu and it would be known to a lot of users. If no one is ready to create the distro and maintain it, nothing is going to happen.

@chanath,

read this over again:

From Khurshid

Khurshid is current team captain so we are going to follow this direction. Also Marco Trevisan is going to guide us with builds process and possible set up at git-hub … but we have to wait on this. Marco has been maintaining the unity-stack for some years so we are going to follow advice from marco and Khurshid. So many things are in place and we do not want to break anything atm or make more work for ourselves.

Regards…

I saw Khurshid’s post before. I’ll await the first Uubuntu distro and the team’s website. Most probably, the first Uubuntu should be based on 17.10, which is sort of stable until next 6 months. 18.04 is not at all stable atm. Anyway, for Unity 7, you don’t need Wayland.

I checked out the links. Very impressive, Already have an experimental ISO :slight_smile:

Cariboo also had suggested I set up a site at wordpress (budgie remix) but I am not going to outright commit to do that atm and do all the maintaining of that site. My intentions about unity9 are that I will make some tweaks/ artwork etc… to an existing ISO, say 17.10 or 16.04. Perhaps in a few weeks. If somebody else is rolling along with the same idea as I concurrently then that is just fine also. So this is good discussion, Your enthusiasm, links and research… appreciated.

regards…

Don’t need wayland … yes, … I realize that.

Thanks.

Thanks for all the info chanath!
I think the thing I see brought up most in the Unity_Revival threads is everyone wants to get involved but all have different talents to contribute. So my big question is what is the most valuable skill needed for creating your own flavor? Is it just testing the crap out of an iso some one keeps spinning up?

My guess is in this case Canonical have already developed the foundation, we just need to keep it rolling.

The other thing it sounds like is we need some leadership, is it everyone falling under one leader who pulls the trigger puts together a website and names the project, or can this grow naturally from the Ubuntu forums and say a democratic team ‘owns’ the project, webpages, et al?

I’m new to the inner workings of distro’s so I would love to know what has succeeded most often in the past. Thoughts?