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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Of course, this is the release that changes the desktop interface around quite a lot. I'm a bit hesitant, although this answer in the FAQ was soothing:

No problem at all. You can choose to launch the classic desktop experience when you log in to your computer.

Not sure if this really means that the choice has to be re-made on every login, or if is remembered. Anyone?

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It's remembered. (I have been running it since beta 2 on my work computer.)

Great to hear, thanks. Now I'll be more likely to do the update.

It remembers. My laptop can't run Unity so I've been running the beta in classic mode, only needed to select it once.

IIRC it's just using the standard GDM "Choose an X Session" functionality. The same thing tha allows you to havea KDE and GNOME installed at once and switch between them. Last time I was using it, it prompted when you were choosing a different setting than your last login with a "Do you want this choice to be one-time or remembered?"

You don't get a choice if you run it in a VM, btw.

It's classic or aught.

What virtualization program are you running?

If you are using VirtualBox you can run apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-utils. You'll also need to enable 3D support under Settings > Display.

Just did this: it works.

Though Unity works as expected (awesome!), there still seems to be some other bugs with VirtualBox integration. A big one for me is that seamless mode doesn't work when running 11.04.

Well it would work if you disabled unity - since unity is rendering everything as 1 display and not multiple windows the way X Windows wants.

VirtualBox 4.0.6 added support for Xorg 10.1 which is the part that was required to get Unity working.

You can still run Unity on any VM (or lower powered machine) by using Unity 2D. It doesn't ship with 11.04 (it will in 11.10, I believe) but you can get it like this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-2d-team/unity-2d-daily

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install unity-2d

Then log out, and choose 'unity 2d' from the login menu when you log back in.

It's in 11.04, you can just install the "unity-2d" package; you should only use the dailies if you're looking for trunk builds that might not be stable

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