Tuesday 27 March 2012

Unity 5.8 issues and workarounds

Well... with the release of Unity 5.8 and associated dependencies, we got the extra testing we were after in precise, and with it a number of bugs. The positive side to this is that with the extra information from our wonderful beta-testers we have been able to work out how to reproduce a number of the issues. As any developer would tell you, being able to reproduce your user's problems is often the biggest hurdle.

Over the weekend I noticed a number of issues around the release of Unity 5.8, and this morning while going through the bug reports, I was happy to notice that we had some way to work around most of them.

Unity 5.8: Flickering and corruption on Unity UI elements - a fix for many is "unity --reset". The cause appears to be how compiz is dealing with plug-ins that are no longer around. For some there have been plug-ins that existed with Oneiric that are no longer around in Precise, and the reset caused them to be removed from the list to load.

Unity 5.8: Login to blank screen (all black or just wallpaper) - some have been fixed by "unity --reset", but the underlying cause of this one is still a bit of a mystery.

Unity 5.8: Can't login to Unity since upgrade to 5.8 - some have found that disabling "Unity MT Grab Handles" compiz plug-in fixes this issue. We still need to work out what the underlying problem is.

white box randomly shows up at top left corner blocking applications from using stuff under it - this one appears to be triggered by chromium desktop notifications. There have been reports that disabling the animations plug-in in compiz, and then re-enabling it fixes this. We are still investigating why.

If you are getting these issues, you can try the workarounds suggested here.

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