What’s in a Unified Name?

digitaleagle Great Links, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I ran across this article …

Engadget: Project Unity stuffs 20 classic consoles into one: if you can’t play it, it’s probably too new (video)

… and it made me wonder how many projects we have named Unity!

Canonical’s Unity

This Unity is the (relatively) new user interface for Ubuntu Linux.  You can read more about it here:

For me, the biggest difference is the new menu.  Instead of a traditional “start”-style menu, Unity introduces this new dash:

One of the things that I need to master as a blogger talking about the Unity interface is the lingo.  Here’s a little article that shows what the different parts are called:

Ask Ubuntu: What’s the right terminology for Unity’s UI elements?

Just FYI, I discovered some nice information about Unity and some of the alternatives:

Unity Gaming Engine

I have a friend and colleague that did some work with the Unity Gaming Engine.  Since it is a 3D engine, I get it confused easily with the “Unity 3D” interface, but it’s completely different.

Just by looking at their website, you can see the quality of the graphics.  I haven’t had a chance to work with it, but it looks very nice.

.Net Unity

While looking around for other things called Unity, I came across this .Net project.  I am not sure I have the bandwidth to try to understand it, but it’s yet another unrelated Unity project.

Codeplex: patterns & practices – Unity

Unity Linux Distribution

I am not sure this distribution is still active.  When I first searched this out, it was there, but now, the site doesn’t respond.  The Wikipedia article describes it a little.  A distribution with that name would be very confusing.

Ubuntu 12.10 and Discrete Video Card

digitaleagle My Inspiron 17R, Uncategorized, XWindows Leave a comment

One of the main driver things that I have to install is the video card.  My laptop has a discrete video card.  Without installing the driver, the graphics seem to work pretty well, but with the driver, I get a very noticeable improvement in power consumption.  After installing the driver, the battery lasts significantly longer.  Also, glxspheres does a nice job of showing the graphics performance difference with and without the acceleration.

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Fedora: Install Microsoft Fonts on Linux

digitaleagle Fedora, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I had a problem a while back with a Word document needs the Verdana font, and I didn’t have it installed on my machine.  A quick search revealed an easy package to install for Ubuntu.  I found some more complicated instructions for Fedora. It looks like they were repeated here, but I found a better solution futher on down.

For some reason, I could not figure out where the rpmbuild directory was supposed to come from. Then, I found this article that was very helpful:
Mauriat Miranda:Personal Fedora 15 Installation Guide — Install Microsoft Truetype Fonts

I just downloaded his msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm and ran:

sudo rpm -ivh ~/Downloads/msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm

Note: I just peaked in my currently installed Ubuntu, and I do see Verdana listed in LibreOffice Writer.  So, I think it installs by default for Ubuntu.