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12.04 unstable: Unity is glitchy and obscures top of program windows

Asked by ec8

Using Ubuntu 12.04, and have been for a few weeks without issue. Ran Update Manager today and after a restart the grey Unity bar at the top of the screen, with my email, battery, wireless connection, volume etc, has suddenly become buggy. The problems are also present in the Launcher. Some issues it is having:

1. If I click any of the icons, for example the time or the volume, the entire bar goes clear and I can see my background behind it for a flash before the bar comes back.

2. There are constant white lines in the bar, and if I bring up the launcher and hover over Firefox for example, I only see "Firefox" with a white line through "Web Browser" after that.

3. The bar has a thick black line underneath it that obscures the top of any application I launch. For example, in Firefox it obscures all of my tabs.

I ran another scan through Update Manager, thinking I needed to download more updates, and nothing came up. Any help? Thanks so much! If you need me to provide screenshots I am happy to do so.

EDIT ~ Seems like it could be an issue with the opacity of the launcher and Unity?

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Chris
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Best Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#1

Is this Unity 2D or 3D? Have you updated and accepted a partial upgrade? It's not always a good idea to do a partial upgrade with a development release as many things can be broken. Currently held back on my beta 1 test system are things like Unity 2D panels, and a whole new kernel update (just a few of the 40 updates that are being held back).

Also, development releases can't really be supported here, though you should look for and report problems as bugs once you are sure where the problem is. This may help the developers, but don't expect too much support here for 12.04 until the stable release. Things change too rapidly and get broken too often, especially this time around.

 If it's broken and you cant find the fix, you might have to re-install your test system and re-do the updates _without_ doing a partial upgrade. If you're keen on testing and want to hang out with other testers it can be quite productive - one group that is often good during the development cycle are the development testers over on Ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=412

There's also QA and testing teams if you really want to get involved. I certainly can't recommend 12.04 for anything but a testing machine at the moment, and certainly not for a main machine: we'll see how beta 2 goes next week.

Chris

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Ratna Prabhakar Chilakamarthi (ch-ratnaprabhakar) said : 		#2

Hi Chris,

Im new to Ubuntu. But i am very eager to get involved in QA and testing team.

Please guide me how to join in the team.

Regards,

Ratna Prabhakar

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ec8 (ec8) said : 		#3

Hey Chris,

I was using Unity 3D. I switched to 2D and it solved the problem, so that narrows down where the issue is. Also, I'm quite new to Ubuntu (used it for less than a year) so I'm not quite sure what you mean by partial upgrade--is it considered a partial upgrade whenever I run the Update Manager or is it only considered a partial upgrade when it starts up and says some packages did not get installed right, run partial upgrade to fix? If so, I encountered no errors and simply restarted the machine like the little red cog in the corner told me to :)

Thanks for the link and the help. I will wait until beta 2 comes out later this week and upgrade to that, in the meantime I will use Unity 2D. I appreciate it!

Evan

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ec8 (ec8) said : 		#4

Thanks Chris, that solved my question.

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Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#5

Hi Evan,

You'll see message box come up at the beginning of the automatic update that says:
"Not all updates can be installed
Run a partial upgrade to install as many updates as possible"

It then lists four possible reasons why not all the packages can be installed:

* A previous update which didn't complete
* Problems with some of the software
* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu
* Normal changes of a pre-release Ubuntu

When running an alpha or beta release obviously the last one is the most likely. What it doesn't explain is that the main reason for some of the packages to be held back is that these packages have been updated by the developers, but the dependencies for them have NOT been released yet.

You have to click on the button "partial upgrade" to let it perform the partial upgrade. If you click the close button the dialogue box will close and only those packages with dependencies that can be met will be updated.

While it offers to do a 'partial upgrade' and install these newest packages it's not always a good idea to do so because the missing dependencies may contain updates that are necessary for the newest packages to work correctly. With experience you get to know when it might be safe to do a partial upgrade, however you might break your system a few times with partial upgrades while gaining this experience. Generally though it's best to be wary if you see kernel packages being held back, and key DE elements like Unity, panels, xorg, compiz etc.

Chris

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Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#6

Hi Ratna,

The best place to get started in testing is to read the wiki and join the Ubuntu testing team and the QA email list. All the information you need is in the testing wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing

I'm a member of this team but haven't done any structured testing yet, and the weekly meetings are at completely the wrong time for me. There's also a laptop testing and QA effort which is of particular interest to me since most manufacturers choose components based on cost and small footprint architecture rather than performance and Linux compatibility.

This close to the release date the focus seems to turn to ISO testing and reliability, but there's always plenty going on and new testers are made very welcome.

Chris

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ec8 (ec8) said : 		#7

If anyone else is having the same issue and hasn't fixed it yet, I simply brought up terminal (alt+ctrl+t) and typed "unity --reset". Fixed it right up. Thanks for the help everyone.