unity-dev team mailing list archive

[sam.spilsbury@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Ted Gould wrote:

> On Tue, 2012-02-07 at 15:04 -0500, Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper wrote:
> > First, Ubuntu Unity removes application menus and displays them as
> > part of the top panel bar. Since we need to not show the top panel bar
> > when we enter VMware Unity mode to give an integrated experience,
> > Ubuntu Unity users are unable to access application menus when they're
> > in VMware Unity mode.
>
> This one is easy because you can set the UBUNTU_APPMENU environment
> variable to NULL and that'll disable menu exporting.
>
> > Second, Ubuntu Unity removes the application titlebar when a window is
> > maximized and instead integrates it into the top panel bar. Same as
> > above, since we need to hide the top panel bar in Ubuntu Unity when
> > our users enter VMware Unity, when our users maximize a window when
> > they're in VMware Unity mode, they lose their window titlebar and have
> > no way to unmaximize their window.

You can re-decorate the window by setting MwmDecorAll on _MOTIF_WM_HINTS 
on the window. I'm not particularly sure how well this plays out with how 
unity works, I am 90% sure that unity will undecorate the window again if 
the client plays around with the hints.

> > Third, when our users enter VMware Unity mode with an Ubuntu Unity DE
> > VM, we need to hide the left side dock/launcher bar.

I'd say it would make sense to force the launcher to hide by changing the 
relevant setting in compizconfig when "Unity" is entered.

These are all important usecases though. To be honest, I'd say that it 
would make sense to have an environment variable or gsettings key to hide 
the "shell" when running in some kind of integrated mode, though thats not 
really my call to make. Unloading and loading plugins is certainly one way 
to go, but the unity plugin is quite big, so dlopen takes a second or two 
to resolve the symbols.

Sam

> These are done by Compiz using the Ubuntu Unity plugin.  In theory, you
> should be able to disable and renable the Unity plugin.  Here be
> dragons, and it's not something we've really tested.  Compiz has some
> complex dependency chains that might break -- not sure.  Try it,
> reply :-)  It might work on a default installation, but if a user has
> customized their Compiz setup it'd be more fragile.  I'm guessing most
> of your users don't do that though.
>
> So, in general, it's not a case that we've actively developed for, but
> there's no reason that it shouldn't work...
>
> 		--Ted