Unity 2010 Beta 2 Impressions

devnet — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:30:12 +0000

As noted previously, I’ve been pretty hard pressed lately in my secular job due to migrations and other fun activities happening throughout the past few months. I did however, get the chance to download Unity 2010 Beta 2 and give it a go. I had some problems when booting because I was brought to a blank black screen with a mouse pointer no matter what options I passed during boot. To get by this, I had to follow some IRC advice on #unitylinux (thanks wile_netbook!) and change to a second tty, kill the Xserver and GDM, followed by executing do-vesa. It’s hard to try to do it quickly though because GDM will try and restart X and switch init levels on you back to a graphical one. To get by this, you’ll need to do the following:

Drop into a different tty. Login as root…if you’re on the liveCD, the password is root. Execute:

ps aux | more

Make note of the PID for X and GDM. Write them down…replace the terms below with your PID numbers:

kill -9 PID_for_X && kill -9 PID_for_GDM && do-vesa

You now should see something other than black screen with mouse cursor. I’m not sure how many systems this affects…but I know my Dell Latitude D630 laptop took it on the chin for this one. Not a huge problem for a Beta…I mean, a distro can’t be all things to everyone.

Overall though, Unity 2010 Beta 2 is much more solid than Beta 1 was for me after getting by the initial X problem. Everything works as it should as far as sound, Internet, and wireless are concerned. I quickly removed PCmanFM and replaced it with Thunar, my file manager of choice. I removed LXPanel and installed Tint2. Installed Nitrogen to manage wallpaper. Installed Parcellite to give me a clipboard, Installed volwheel to give me a volume applet to control volume. Installed Pragha to give myself a great music player. Installed Irssi to allow me to get my IRC fix and put pidgin in play to IM. I had a usable, customized desktop within about an hour. And it’s been really solid…just as solid as my Arch Openbox desktop I run at home…which makes me feel good about this Beta.

So what else have I been working on? I’ve been working on a large (VERY large) tutorial on file permissions and making use of groups for file/directory access to add to the tutorials section of YALB. This thing has been in work since last year and I’m attempting to finish it up before the months end to give a good representation of what file permissions in Linux are for and how they work with users and groups. I’m also going to write up a tutorial on how to customize Unity 2010 Beta 2 into a lightweight Openbox desktop. So, some good updates hovering on the horizon. Stay tuned

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Unity 2010 Beta 2 Impressions originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 15, 2010.

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Unity 2010 Beta 2 Impressions