Natty: Workspace Switcher Not Working

[coljohnhannibalsmith]

Hi,

I just upgraded to Natty, from Maverick and I can't get 'Workspace-Switcher' to work.:confused:

As a matter-of-fact, I was completely dumbfounded when Natty launched for the first time, and I was presented with 'no' menus. What I got instead was some black-screen with some very attractive icons on it; but the icons had no organization to them that I could comprehend, and the categories that were presented didn't make any sense, based on the applications that I had installed. Apparently the designers of Unity thought that it would be a good idea for me to go 'fish' for my applications. Also, the most frequently used applications that I had pinned to gnome-panel disappeared, and I couldn't even rebuild them. The 3D menu, on the left, that combined my desktop icons, with the icons that were 'formerly' pinned to gnome-panel was also very attractive; but provided me with no useful functionality, other than complete disorientation and confusion. The scrolling was also slower than poo. All-in-all a very beautiful 'boat-anchor.' This distro should probably be renamed 'Virtual-Vista.' Fortunately, when I reenabled 'Desktop-Cube' and 'Rotate-Cube' and I think some other options related to Gnome, I got my menus and icons back. What a relief!!! I'm a power-user, and I have something on the order of 100 applications loaded. I just 'can't' go looking all-over-creation to find them...

Unfortunately, Workspace-Switcher could not be activated by clicking on it, only by <ctrl-alt-left/right arrow keys>. Also, unfortunately, all the desktops displayed the same applications. Definitetly 'not' a ready for prime-time player.

I assume that this is a bug? Is there a work-around for this? If so, can someone please share it with me? For now I'm stuck with a ruptured-duck that can't swim. I usually have all four desktops populated, and switch between them whenever I have to wait on an application that's busy, or I get tired. I really 'need' this functionality.

Any help greatly appreciated.



Thanks, Hannibal


P.S., It's more than Ok with me that a distro not be released, if it's not ready. I'd certainly prefer that to 'shock-and-awe.'

[coljohnhannibalsmith]

Well after getting my forehead all bloodied, beating it on my desktop, I think I may have found the correct settings to get Workspace-Switcher to work properly...

In 'compizconfig-settings-manager,' this assumes you've installed it, which you'll need to, you'll have to select:

Category > General > General Options > Desktop Size

Then set "Number of Desktops" to "1."

Then right-click on Workspace-Switcher and select preferences; and set 'columns' to the number of workspaces you want, and 'rows' to '1,' unless you want to stack them for some reason... After I did this Workspace-Switcher functioned normally.

Jesus, Unity is pretty; and everyone knows that Ubuntu has been lacking in the 'skins' department; but good-grief, why force this change on unsuspecting users, especially when the code appears to be in the Alpha state. "It just locks-up on many users, myself included." I did read that Natty was going to be a stretch-release. I just didn't know it was going to be 'me' that was going to get stretched!!!

All seriousness aside, in my opinion Unity should not have been enabled by default.. There should have been some kind of 'very-obvious' on-off switch for Unity, which would have allowed a user to switch between both modes easily, and without getting lost.


Just one irate customer's opinion.:rolleyes:




Hannibal

[TrotskyIcepick]

Hmmm, glad you got this to work, I just did a complete fresh install of 11.04 into an Oracle VBox on a ******* Vista host, had same problem....tried your solution.....and bingo, stuck with problem.

I'm just running Ubuntu in "Classic" mode, and have tried removing and re-adding the workspace switcher to no avail.

[gareththomasnz]

doesnt work in classic mode and nor does ctrl-alt for cube