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Linaro 11.06 Release Brings Unity 3D Port To ARM 54

An anonymous reader writes "For a long time what x86 users took for granted was just 'the future' for ARM devices. Now that time is over. Linaro — a non-profit engineering organization funded by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments — released a first port of Ubuntu Unity 3D experience and Compiz. If you have a pandaboard, go ahead, download, install the Linaro 11.06 LEB/Ubuntu images and try it out! It's just a few minutes away."
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Linaro 11.06 Release Brings Unity 3D Port To ARM

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  • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Friday July 01, 2011 @09:18PM (#36639280)

    I've been running Debian on my SheevaPlug and DockStars since they showed up at my door step. I haven't run into many (if any) applications that weren't compiled for ARM but were for i386 or amd_64.

    Sure enough, there's Compbiz [debian.org].

    It's bare bones, it's not always pretty, but apt has never failed me. It just works. Sid is almost always more up to date than the latest 'stable' release. They don't hard lock any packages to any release (unlike Ubuntu where if you don't want to go past 10.04, you're either stuck with back ports, adding in additional PPAs or dealing with bugs).
    -
    Debian / Ubuntu reminds me of a joke an old Rugby player told me. A young bull and an old bull are sitting up on a hill over looking a valley of sweet cows. The young bull gets excited and says, "Lets run down there and fuck one of those cows!". The old bull quiets him down and says, "Lets walk down there and fuck all of those cows."

    • by Anonymous Coward

      What are you talking about? Seriously, you make no sense. First og all, what does apt have to do with this? Apt works the same way on Debian and Ubuntu, on ARM and Intel. So why would you want to mention that?

      Then you go on to say that you can always install any package on Debian without considering dependencies. That's obviously bullshit. You can use apt pinning in Debian, just as you can in Ubuntu. But since Ubuntu is supported for much longer periods of time, it makes sense that they don't introduce new

      • by Tubal-Cain ( 1289912 ) on Friday July 01, 2011 @11:04PM (#36639604) Journal

        What are you talking about? Seriously, you make no sense. First og all, what does apt have to do with this? Apt works the same way on Debian and Ubuntu, on ARM and Intel. So why would you want to mention that?

        He probably meant Debian's package QA/

        Then you go on to say that you can always install any package on Debian without considering dependencies.

        I don't see where he says anything like that.

        That's obviously bullshit. You can use apt pinning in Debian, just as you can in Ubuntu.

        He's talking about the releases themselves. Ubuntu picks a major release number of Gnome/KDE/Firefox/LibreOffice/etc, and sticks with it through the entire run of that release. Natty has LibreOffice 3.3.x, and won't ever get LibreOffice 3.4.x in the official channels. Debian, if I'm understanding him right, doesn't force itself to stick with an old branch simply because "that's the version it was released with"

        But since Ubuntu is supported for much longer periods of time.

        Debian 5.0 (Lenny) was released in February of '09, and will be supported for a little over three years (April '12). Ubuntu supports its regular releases for about a year and a half, desktop LTS for three years, and server LTS for 5 years.

        And I really didn't get your joke. You mean Debian is stupid because Ubuntu gets all the cows? I don't agree. Debian is nice. Ubuntu is _really_ nice on ARM. Let's just hope Debian can catch up in that field.

        The young bull would reach the cows first, but he'll be too worn out for anything but one quickie. The old bull paces himself, and so has a better experience when he gets there.

        Ubuntu is the young bull: it tries so hard to keep pace with the new shiny, but the pressure to release quickly doesn't leave much time for working out the bugs. For days (or even weeks) after every Ubuntu release, it seems like every other Ubuntu-related comment is about how $NEW_VERSION broke something that worked just fine in $OLD_VERSION.
        Debian isn't in a rush; it'll upgrade when it is ready, and will be more stable when it does. I was getting pretty antsy about how long sid stayed on KDE 4.4, but it finally moved to 4.6 a few weeks ago. My DE got entirely overhauled, and when it was over...it Just Worked(tm). There were no unresolved dependencies. Nothing was crashing. Compare with Unity. ;-)

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Debian / Ubuntu reminds me of a joke an old Rugby player told me.

      I think that rugby player was Robert Duvall and the movie was Colors. [imdb.com]

    • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      Yes, Unity runs on ARM already. But it uses OpenGL. ARM-based stuff like the PandaBoard tends to only support OpenGL ES because nobody licenses the OpenGL drivers from Imagination Technologies (only OpenGL ES drivers). This Linaro announcement is of note because they've ported Unity 3D to OpenGL ES.

      I've been playing around with Ubuntu 11.04 on a PandaBoard for the past few days, and while most software works, there's a decent chunk of software that is either missing from the armel repositories, or if it's t

  • The first comments need someone with many mod points...
  • Ok, I'm old. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by synthesizerpatel ( 1210598 ) on Friday July 01, 2011 @09:25PM (#36639302)

    Back in the day we had reasonably boring X11 interfaces - to date myself I used twm and was pretty happy with it.

    Now-a-days the 'future' of both the KDE and Gnome window managers just gives me a headache. Having shit move
    all over the screen is annoying, it does not improve my productivity - it reduces the interaction with the computer to
    a video game with the goal of 'get your work done!'.

    When you're designing UIs, less is more.

    * Less movement
    * Less jittering icons
    * Less mouse-focus auto-magnification
    * Less screen flipping and transformation effects
    * Less ribbons
    * Less blurred and translucent backgrounds

    These do look cool but they're not enhancing my 'experience' and they're certainly not helping me get any work done or make a phone call faster.

    So quit wasting time with this stuff and go make touch interfaces with some audio feedback so blind people aren't left out on this next generation of handheld technology. Thanks.

    • And they crash when I hit show desktop with 50 windows opens, just too many animations. I find Ubuntu to be less stable than Windows 7.
    • Using TWM doesn't date you as much as you think... yes, I've been using Slackware since 2.0 (which really does date me), but I used TWM on one of my laptops as recently as 2009.... I had a login that defaulted to TWM for use in fucking with people... every tab I had open was an instance of xterm, and was running a terminal version of some common GUI tool... emacs, links, irssi, etc..

      I used it for messing with people at Starbucks... if people asked what it was, I told them it was a beta of the next version o

  • ... then you would end up with Unity??

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I mistook the article title as being about the Unity 3D [unity3d.com] game development tool, which unfortunately doesn't [unity3d.com] support Linux yet. Unity [ubuntu.com] is a desktop system for Ubuntu which apparently happens to have 3D effects.

    It'd be nice if you clarified product names when writing headlines.

  • why the hell would anyone thing I would like that crap on an ARM? less is more, Shuttleworth!
  • If Unity uses OpenGL, does that mean it will use the GPU more and the CPU less?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Unity3d.com is already a popular game engine

    • Exactly. What the hell is '3D' doing in a window manager? Are the Ubuntu devs trying to hop on the 3d movie hype bandwagon? It's just sad.
      More so that they are now steeling the name of the excellent Unity3D game engine.

       

      • by Anonymous Coward

        It's to distinguish it from "Unity2d" which is Canonical's version of the "fallback" (Gnome2-like) mode from Gnome 3. Unity3d gets accelerated by the 3d rendering parts of your graphics card, while Unity2d is only accelerated by the 2d RENDER extension.

        To me it looks like Unity is just "Gnome Shell Lite" but I can't run either one at work, as they both crash when handed a two screen (3 monitor) setup with 16bpp frame buffers by X. E17 works just fine though.

  • This Unity thing is causing sysCatastophe... First, you install Compiz. Second, mess around. Finally, bingo! You got bugged.
    • That's because in the Ubuntu mindset, Compiz = Compositing. Now that several window managers have their own compositing (GNOME 3's WM, Unity, KWin) it can cause collisions. The same thing happens when you try to fullscreen a KVM or QEMU virtual machine with a compositor running.
  • http://unity3d.com/ [unity3d.com] is what I thought this article was all about, imagine my disappointment when discovering some stupid window manager reuses the name.

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