at this stage it gave errors about missing dependencies gdu and gtest which i installed from synaptic. after which rerunning cmake gave no errors
$make . . . Building CXX object tests/CMakeFiles/standalone-dash.dir/standalone_dash.cpp.o In file included from /home/user/unity/tests/standalone_dash.cpp:33:0: /home/user/unity/tests/../plugins/unityshell/src/DashStyle.h:83:41: error: ‘nux::ButtonVisualState’ has not been declared