kTsang+

Just Updated to Ubuntu 11.04

Last night, I took the 10.04 > 10.10 > 11.04 update path to the newest Ubuntu version.  I had downloaded the ISO boot-up and wanted to do a clean install.  That never worked…

Unity and it’s the poor fallback

Booting up the ISO caused a big issue on my system.  My computer has on-board 865g Intel Graphics… which is really crap in today’s standard.  But I never expected any problems with running Ubuntu on it…

I booted the ISO up and much to my shock - it appears that Ubuntu Live CD had crashed it’s GUI.  The installer didn’t pop-up… the screen wasn’t drawn properly… it was all a mess!  I couldn’t have possibly installed Ubuntu on this!

The other upgrade path

I didn’t know about the Unity issue with my graphics card… I thought I might have had a corrupted installation disk or something.  So, I went for the Distribution Update path via Ubuntu 10.10.  It ran smoothly, taking around 30 minutes to download and 3 hours to install.  During this time, the computer froze several times while it installed the new icons / X Window stuff…  At the end, the installation looked like a success!  I clicked on the “Reboot now” button and waited for the new Unity to show up after the loading screen… I was deeply disappointed.

Unity = fail on Intel 865g

Yeah… Ubuntu booted up to a nasty message saying that Unity wasn’t supported on my system and that I should boot Ubuntu Classic.  Ubuntu Classic died too… it crashed many times… and I decided to have a little look on the web for soultions.

Turns out Unity 3D didn’t support 865g.  And, it turns out that you can install Unity 2D which works great on OpenGL-less cards.

I was surprised that Unity 2D didn’t come included and made active once the hardware was detected to be crap.  I wasn’t happy when my OS died in front of my eyes!

But Unity 2D looks good now

I’m loving Unity at the moment.  I’ll write more about the new features in a future post… But, it’s working just fine… (perhaps a little annoying, cause’ it feels like it’s designed for touch screens)…