It hurts me to say it but Ubuntu is broken for me.
I upgraded 2 machines to Ubuntu 11.04 on Saturday night and left them downloading/upgrading over night. One of the machines, my Pentium 4 desktop machine. Upgraded and after a reboot looks and feels pretty much the same as it did before hand. There was a message to say it wasn’t able to run Unity because the graphics card was too low spec and after a click ok, its pretty much the same as it was before, nothing really changed. All seems good.
However my laptop (Dell M1210 XPS) also got upgraded after the pop up came up. After a reboot, I logged into Ubuntu which I assumed had unity installed and I’m left with my usual desktop picture some icons but no menus at all. What makes things worst is the location where I assume there should have been a menu is now black. So down the left hand side is black and along the top is black. Nothing… I would show a screen shot but as I discovered my keyboard mappings have also been lost in the upgrade. Yes even Fn+Print Scrn no longer works. Luckily Gnome-Do still kind of works, so I’m able to open applications, including screenshots with some hassle.
I finally logged out and tried running Ubuntu in classic mode (I assume using Gnome instead of Unity). Things are better but still not correct. My keyboard shorts are still somewhat broken and its a nightmare not having Compiz cube switching which I didn’t know I was so use to now. After a little googling I got cube switching back but only using a keyboard short cut. It seems the automatic switching when the mouse touches the side of the screen is no longer available?
Right now I seem to have three choices…
- Live without Compiz and run Ubuntu totally plain
- Run Ubuntu with Compiz using classic mode and work on the annoying things like (you may have noticed) no chrome/window boarders. (at one point I had no menus! Try saving something with no save menu…) Compiz seems to accept some changes but do random things to some of my settings. Like currently I can’t move windows or even change there sizes.
- Reinstall the whole thing from fresh and attempt to get Unity working
Its frustrating and I don’t really know what happened but for me right now Ubuntu 11.04 is simply broken… Expect screenshots as when I can consistently take them and upload them.
Try out Pinguy OS
Pinguy OS? Really? I was considering Mint or Fedora to be honest
Daft question, but have you tried a live CD (or live flash drive) on the machine. My gut reaction is that the machine is compatible but one of your customisations has got in the way of the upgrade process. Also to get you going can you get in to a package manager and reinstall Gnome so you will at least be able to log in to that instead.
Yeah I download the ISO again just to do exactly that but I was able to call up the package manager and do some serious reinstalling of compiz and unity…
Things still turn ugly when logging into Ubuntu with the Unity shell but at least the classic mode is actually pretty usable. So there’s no rush to switch yet…
I upgraded my Ubuntu desktop at the office. Needed a few tweaks with the Appearance and clearing the .mozilla folder. yes, Unity is awful.
Time to get back to basics – Debian command line may be best for you, Ian.
lol, maybe not
[...] were using it in the context of Ubuntu 11.04 but it equally applies to iOS and many other operating systems and [...]
Ouch. What were they thinking? This is awful.
[...] Unity had already left a nasty taste in my user experience and didn’t really work correctly, so I thought whats have I got to lose by installing Gnome 3.0 on top of Ubuntu 11.04. [...]