Unity Tomboy Lens Available For Ubuntu 13.04, Supports Dash Previews

May 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Unity Tomboy Lens has been updated to work with the latest Unity available in Ubuntu 13.04. Also, the lens now supports Dash previews so you can quickly take a look at your note contents by right clicking the note in Dash.

Unity Tomboy Lens

The lens allows you to search and open notes via Unity Dash and the notes show up both in the Tomboy lens as well as in the home lens.
Despite its name, Unity Tomboy Lens also supports Gnote. Important note about this though: if both Gnote and Tomboy are installed, only Gnote notes will show up in Dash so if you want to use it with Tomboy, make sure Gnote is not installed (if Gnote was installed, log out and log back in after removing it – a simple Unity restart wasn’t enough in my test).

Unity Tomboy Lens Dash Preview
Unity Tomboy Lens – Dash preview

For those not familiar with Tomboy and Gnote, these are note-taking applications that allow linking between notes, support note synchronization, are extensible through plugins and more.

Install Unity Tomboy Lens in Ubuntu 13.04 or 13.10

To install Unity Tomboy Lens in Ubuntu 13.04 or 13.10 Saucy Salamander by using its official PPA, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:remi.rerolle/unity-lens-tomboy
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-tomboy

Once installed, log out and log back in and the new lens should show up in Dash. When opening Dash, the Tomboy indicator will be launched if it’s not already running – that’s because the lens needs Tomboy to be running.

If you encounter bugs, report them @ GitHub.

Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.


Web Upd8 – Ubuntu / Linux blog

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Unity 8, Mir To Be Experimental Choice In Ubuntu 13.10

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical’s next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October…
Phoronix

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Unity 7, Compiz To Be Polished For Ubuntu 13.10

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical’s next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release…
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Ubuntu’s Mir Moves Ahead With Unity 8 Interface

May 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Canonical’s Kevin Gunn has issued a status update on new achievements for the Mir Display Server as well as for the next-generation “Unity 8″ user-interface…
Phoronix

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Another blow for Flash as Unity gaming engine ends support

April 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Unity Technologies has announced that it has dropped support for Adobe Flash from its cross-platform Unity game development toolset, citing the declining popularity of the technology among developers and inconsistent support from Adobe. “As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses,” Unity founder and CEO David Helgason wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “We will continue to support our existing Flash customers throughout the 4.x cycle.”
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Get The Ubuntu Touch Feeling On The Unity Desktop With These Launcher Icons

April 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment
A few days ago we had an article about a new Unity Revamped PPA that adds some tweaks to Ubuntu 12.04, among which there were some nice Ubuntu Touch-style assets for the Unity Launcher. If you’re using Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04 and want to use these Ubuntu Touch Launcher assets, you’ll find instructions on how to do it below.


Using the Ubuntu Touch-style Launcher icons in Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04

1. To use the Ubuntu Touch Launcher icons / assets on the desktop (Unity), download the icons from DeviantArt and extract the downloaded archive in your home folder.

2. Then, to replace the Unity icons with the Ubuntu Touch-style icons, use the following command:

- for Ubuntu 12.10:

cd && sudo cp -r unity/6 /usr/share/unity/

-for Ubuntu 13.04:

cd && sudo cp -r unity/6/* /usr/share/unity/icons/

Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail screenshot after the changes:

Ubuntu Touch icons 13.04 Unity Launcher

Ubuntu 12.10 screenshot after the changes:

Ubuntu Touch icons 13.04 Unity Launcher
3. And finally, restart Unity by pressing ALT + F2 and entering “unity” (without the quotes), or log out and log back in.

Reverting the changes

If you  revert the changes, simply reinstall unity-common using the following command:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity-common

And then restart Unity (press ALT + F2 and enter: “unity” or log out and log back in).

Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.


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How To Install Unity Smart Scopes In Ubuntu 13.04 [PPA]

April 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Ubuntu 13.04 was supposed to get a new Unity Smart Scopes feature, which eventually didn’t make it, but if you don’t want to wait for Ubuntu 13.10 to try it, you can install it right now in Ubuntu 13.04, by using a PPA.

Smart Scopes tries to provide a better and smarter Dash search experience by adding various scopes that return relevant data depending on the search terms.
Smart Scopes Ubuntu Unity
 
Installing the Smart Scopes, you’ll get some new categories and sources on the home lens. When you search for something, Dash tries to automatically select the right categories and sources for your search term so for instance if you search for “Pink Floyd”, Dash will automatically select the “Music”, “Reference” (which in turn selects the Wikipedia source, among others), “Files & Folders” and so on. Or if you search for “Barcelona”, it should display the weather, etc. You can also manually select / deseelect categories or sources.

Below you can see a search for “pink floyd” without manually selecting any source in the sidebar filter:

Smart Scopes did figure out this is music-related and displayed my Pink Floyd albums and some online info about Pink Floyd (among others), but it also displayed some applications.

And here’s the same search again, with some custom sources selected in the filter:

Smart Scopes Ubuntu Unity
That looks a lot better and that’s pretty much how the default search results should have looked like. The default search results are ok considering the Smart Scopes feature hasn’t been officially released and it’s still work in progress, but hopefully the scopes will be smart enough in the future so we won’t need to manually select any categories.

Smart Scopes video

To understand exactly how this works, watch the video below:


(direct video link; for more videos, subscribe to your YouTube channel)
Remember, this feature is under development so it may change by the time it’s added by default in Ubuntu.

Supported scopes / sources

Currently, the PPA provides the following scopes / sources:

  • Audacious
  • Banshee
  • Calculator
  • Chromium Bookmarks
  • Clementine
  • Colour Lovers
  • Dev Help
  • DeviantArt
  • Facebook
  • Files & Folders
  • Flickr
  • Evolution
  • Firefox Bookmarks
  • Gallica
  • Google Drive
  • GitHub
  • Gmusicbrowser
  • Google News
  • Guayadeque
  • IMDB
  • Launchpad
  • Manpages
  • Music Store
  • Musique
  • OpenClipArt
  • OpenWeatherMap
  • Picasa
  • Remote Videos
  • Rhythmbox
  • SoundCloud
  • Shotwell
  • SshSearch
  • Texdoc
  • Videos
  • VirtualBox
  • Yahoo Stock
  • Yelp
  • Zotero
These are all the sources used by the Smart Scopes feature for now but more will be available in the future.

How to install Unity Smart Scopes in Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

The Smart Scopes feature wasn’t added by default in Ubuntu 13.04 because it’s not completely ready so if you decide to use the Smart Scopes PPA, you must be aware that this feature is currently under development and some things can break, some scopes might not work and also, Unity and Compiz will use more system resources. Also, in my test, after installing the Smart Scopes, the Unity Friends Lens has stopped working!
If you’re ok with the above warning, let’s proceed with the installation:

1. To add the Unity Smart Scopes PPA and install the new Smart Scopes feature in Ubuntu 13.04, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-unity/experimental-certified
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Important: for the last command above, make sure no packages are removed except for the unity-lens-shopping. If the command tries to remove more packages, it means something is broken on your system and you need to fix it so do not proceed with the installation!

2. To make sure the packages we’ve installed from the PPA are not overwritten if newer lenses / scopes land in Ubuntu 13.04 (the PPA will be updated eventually if that happens, but it’s better to use this so things don’t break), install the following package:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-unity-experimental-certified

3. And now run “sudo apt-get upgrade” which will actually downgrade the packages to the version from the PPA, if they are older than the ones available in the official Ubuntu repositories (if any; at the time I’m writing this, the packages that will be downgraded are the Unity Files Lens and Gdocs / Gdrive Scope):
sudo apt-get upgrade

4. Once all the packages are installed / upgraded successfully, restart your system (a simple Unity restart or logout doesn’t seem to be enough).

Report any bugs you may find, HERE.

Revert the changes

If you want to remove the Smart Scopes and go back to the lenses / scopes used by default in Ubuntu 13.04, use the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntu-unity/experimental-certified

For me, ppa-purge doesn’t work in Ubuntu 13.04 if the purged PPA has a package that’s not available in another source (like in the official Ubuntu repositories): it segfaults instead of purging the PPA. If that’s the case for you too, you can revert the changes manually, using the following commands:
sudo sed -i 's/^deb/#deb/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-unity-experimental-certified-raring.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-unity-experimental-certified
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-dee-1.0/raring gir1.2-unity-5.0/raring libdee-1.0-4/raring libdee-dev/raring libunity-common/raring libunity-core-6.0-5/raring libunity-dev/raring libunity-protocol-private0/raring libunity9/raring unity/raring unity-common/raring unity-lens-applications/raring unity-lens-music/raring unity-lens-photos/raring unity-lens-video/raring unity-scope-musicstores/raring unity-scope-video-remote/raring unity-services/raring

The first command above disables the PPA. Then, we update the software sources and remove “ubuntu-unity-experimental-certified” which we’ve installed to pin the packages from the PPA (under step 3). And finally, the last command above downgrades the packages that were upgraded from the Smart Scopes PPA and automatically removes all the scopes that were installed from the same Smart Scopes PPA.

And finally, restart the system.

Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.


Web Upd8 – Ubuntu / Linux blog

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KDE, GNOME, Unity, Razor-Qt Developers Met Up

April 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Last week at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg there was a meeting between developers of the KDE, GNOME, Unity, and Razor-qt desktop environments…
Phoronix

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Ubuntu’s Unity Next Running On Mir Display Server

April 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Canonical developers have hit the milestone of being able to run their “Unity Next” desktop atop the Mir Display Server. The work is still very early, but it shows for Ubuntu Touch they can swap out Android’s SurfaceFlinger for Mir…
Phoronix

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Unity 7 Fast-tracked Into Ubuntu 13.04

March 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Unity 7 is in the fast-lane to land in Ubuntu 13.04, though not entirely planned.
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Unity Notification Area (Systray) Whitelist Is Obsolete [Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Changes]

February 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Old notification area (before AppIndicators)
The notification area (systray) was removed from the Unity panel with Ubuntu 11.04, but you could still use it by whitelisting applications which would allow the icons to show up in the notification area. But not any more!
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How To Get Unity Launcher Window Dodge In Ubuntu 12.10 Or 13.04

February 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The patch that adds the old window dodge autohide behaviour for the Unity Launcher hasn’t been updated for Ubuntu 12.10, but an old script that implements the same behaviour, with some limitations, now works with Ubuntu 12.10 and even 13.04.
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