As I mentioned in my earlier blog posts, I have started using Unity on Arch Linux. However the packages that are hosted at http://unity.xe-xe.org/ haven’t been updated in a while and has resulted in some conflicts with the updates coming through the main repositories. I have written an email to the person who’s managing the repo, but decided to build my own packages as well. This is how I setup a pristine chroot environment to build the Unity PKGBUILDS created by Xiao-Long Chen. I’m not sure if its the prescribed way to do it, but it works!Continue reading
Tag: unity
Install Unity on Arch Linux
Some might wonder, why would you do something like that? Install Unity on Arch Linux? Absolutely blasphemy. But really, I have fallen in love with this combination. Till a couple weeks back, I had been using Ubuntu for close to 4-5 years without experimenting with any other Linux distros. I usually resist the urge to install the alpha releases, but by the time the beta releases start coming out, I’m just itching to get hold of it, irrespective of how catastrophic it has turned out sometimes from the work perspective. So when Ubuntu 12.10 beta2 came out, I installed it. But I was sorely disappointed. Unity kept crashing for no good reason, generally not a very stable system. I know ‘beta’ versions aren’t supposed to be stable etc, but it shouldn’t crash as often as it did. Continue reading
Why I like Unity?
There’s a lot of criticism out there for the Unity Desktop Environment. Strangely I can’t echo the same sentiments. I quite like using Unity (mind you not Ubuntu). Here are a few reasons why and why not.
The Unity Launcher: I have always loved launchers. Back in the days, when I would change desktop environments every second day – fluxbox, gnome, kde, wmaker, etc, one thing was constant. I had gnome-panel (&) start from my xinitrc irrespective of what distribution I used. Also I have never been a fan of taskbars. The Unity launcher marries the traditional launcher with a highly usable taskbar. It had some usability issues when Ubuntu initially switched to Unity, but it’s almost perfect now with AppIndicator Support. I can have upto 15 applications open at the same time and it’s still a breeze to manage them.Continue reading
Get Android Remote Notifier to work with Unity on Ubuntu Natty (11.04) and Oneiric (11.10)
Ubuntu Natty onwards, the default desktop manager is Unity. Unity has disabled the default system tray, and applications which wish to show up on the Unity panel should support Ubuntu Application Indicators. Unfortunately Android Remote Notifier doesn’t support App Indicators yet and hence doesn’t show up in the Unity panel on being executed. Luckily for us, there’s a way to get around this issue.Continue reading