How to install the Unity Desktop environment and create the session entry on Trisquel 7.0

Trisquel 7.0 have unity on its repositories but, for some reason, the "unity-ubuntu" session won't be listed and therefore unable to be launched easily.

Installing unity

To install unity just open a terminal and do the following:

$ sudo aptitude install unity

Using the script to create the desktop entry

• NOTE: The problem of the non-existent session has been adressed in one of the contributions to the package-helpers so the script shouldn't be necessary in the next build of the operating system, in other words: look if the session is present before using the script because it will probably be present in the next update of Unity.

The easy way to create the entry is by using the following script. Just follow the instructions to do that:

• Click on unity-1.sh.gz to download a compressed archive with the script. Once it is downloaded, open the terminal emulator and use the cd command where the file was downloaded and uncompress it with the following command:

$ gzip -d unity-1.sh.gz

• It's time to make the file executable:

$ chmod +x unity-1.sh

• Run the script with sudo:

$ sudo ./unity-1.sh

• Reboot your computer and "ubuntu" should be listed.

Other tweaks

It is recommended that you also install Unity Tweak Tool to disable the online features of the Dash, which are a serious privacy concern.

To install it, open the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freyja-dev/unity-tweak-tool-daily

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

sudo apt-get install unity-webapps-common

Done! You might want to remove the PPA after installing.

If you want Trisquel to look even more like Ubuntu beyond the Dash, open Tweaks (or maybe it's called System Settings in English) and change the Appearance to Ambiance and the icons to Ubuntu-mono-dark.

On Unity privacy issues

Here is useful information on (trying to) remove the spying in unity https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://fixubuntu.com/

Trisquel 6 is based on 12.04, no spying there and Trisquel 7 on 14.04 where this needs to be applied.

Attachment	Size
unity-1.sh.gz	510 bytes
unity.txt	964 bytes