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View Full Version : [ubuntu] 11.10 upgrade breaks Unity



Envy Life
October 30th, 2011, 03:39 AM
I've always felt my system was a house of cards, using dmraid I can never rely on a kernel upgrade to properly set my grub boot settings. Went well for the last handful of upgrades, but finally got bit on 11.10. So I could handle grub, but what I can't stand is the graphics breaking.

I thought Unity under 11.04 has ran pretty well for me. Aside from a few little hiccups with ctrl-alt-t sometimes not working for no apparent reason. This time Unity starts up fine, but I have two monitors and it goes back to mirrored mode. Well the Unity launcher worked for a bit and then disappeared. I can no longer run apps, hot-key doesn't work, launcher is no where to be found, even across reboots.

I decided to try to mess with the video driver (ATI card), and trying to hack my way through I broke graphics entirely, and had to reset with "aticonfig --initial". Unity still doesn't work so I tried gnome-shell. The fonts and display was hosed up possibly from an old configuration (This box has been through 6 ubuntu distribution upgrades), who knows. So I go to Unity 2D.

I'll just thank whomever decided to do this, but just having it there smacks of foresight that admits that Unity 3D is a pile of garbage in 11.10. Anyway with mirroring screens still, I had to install fglrx-amdcccle, so that I could configure dual monitor setup. I did that, rebooted, second screen is a mess, re-configured again, and finally have a working box again after a half day's worth of frustration. For now I'm sticking with 2D I suppose, I'm tired of messing with it.

I feel like I'm back doing old-school Linux desktop installs with Ubuntu 5 or 6, or maybe before with Debian or Mandrake, where every upgrade breaks one of the only 2 things important to a desktop - disks and display. 11.10 seems a few steps backwards from the seamless upgrades I started taking for granted, and is, frankly, the only reason I used Ubuntu in the first place.

I'll just end by saying I did 3 prior 11.10 upgrades and all went seamless. The difference? Newer Ubuntu installs with out-of-the-box standard configuration. Does this mean I'm going to have to start doing clean installs once per year like the Windows days of the 90's? I'm beginning to think so.

Envy Life
October 31st, 2011, 04:01 PM
I read in another thread this may fix Unity 3D, I'll have to try it out...

delete ~/.compiz-1/session/ and ~/.config/compiz-1/compizconfig/config.

raja.genupula
October 31st, 2011, 04:24 PM
Hi man

have you tried

unity --reset

or
unity --replace