Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Testing the HUD! (Heads up display)

I hope everyone has seen the announcement about the upcoming Heads Up Display feature hopefully landing in 12.04. If not, go read about it here: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939 I'll wait.

Great, now in order for this feature to show up in precise it needs some more work and refinement. Our focus on quality continues and this feature is not excluded -- in order to ensure its of release quality for precise, we're asking the community to help test and evaluate the feature. Here's everything you need to know to get started:

Prerequisites: Make sure you are running the latest version of precise, and all your packages are up to date. Unfortunately this cannot be installed on oneiric or any previous ubuntu release.

1) Add the HUD ppa (https://launchpad.net/~unity-team/+archive/hud). You can do this by issuing the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-team/hud
2) Update apt and run a dist upgrade -- this should prompt you to upgrade unity and some indicators
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
3) Restart your unity session by logging out and logging back in again.

Now you should be up and running. Invoke the HUD using the 'alt' key. Go and try out your favorite apps and see how things work. When you find a bug, at this point please do not use the ubuntu-bug command or apport -- these tools are not setup to handle working within a ppa. Instead file a bug using launchpad against one of the following projects depending on the nature of the bug:

For anything related to the user interface, ie directly unity related, file a bug against unity: http://bugs.launchpad.net/unity When filing, tagging the bug with 'HUD' would be helpful to streamline visibility to the unity developers.

For any issues with matching or other issues core to the tool itself, file them against the appmenu indicator. http://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-appmenu

Still stuck or have more questions? Visit the wonderful folks on #ubuntu-unity on Freenode. And remember, HUD will also land with unity 5.2 coming soon!

23 comments:

  1. W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/unity-team/hud/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/unity-team/hud/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/unity-team/hud/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found

    E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The HUD is not available for Oneiric Ocelot, just for Precise Pangolin.

      Delete
    2. Server Down,. info : http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/unity_team_hud
      all packages have been deleted from this repository..

      Delete
  2. W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/unity-team/hud/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/unity-team/hud/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/unity-team/hud/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found

    E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

    Got the same problem

    ReplyDelete
  3. As mentioned in teh post "Prerequisites: Make sure you are running the latest version of precise, and all your packages are up to date."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, please make sure you are running the latest version of precise. I'll bold that so it stands out. The ppa unfortunately doesn't contain any oneiric packages -- the changes are too large.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I know I'm not following the instructions, but I tried to install the HUD on oneiric using the ppa for precise. Is this a setup known to be non-working well? I seem to be able to load the HUD and work with it, but I don't get many useful suggestions (maybe also because my system is in Italian).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stefano, yes you have a non-standard installation if you've done that :-). The unity team stopped providing packages for oneiric last year in the unity ppa. Newer dependencies are being introduced that may cause you issues should you continue updating and stay on oneiric.

      Delete
  6. I am using unity 2d. Are these packages working with unity 2d on precise? Do they work with the unity2d ppa?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unity2d support is planned and will be included in the final release. Support for unity2d is still in progress at this moment however.

      Delete
    2. Are there any major hurdles for having this in xfce/Xubuntu?

      Delete
    3. The basic technology (dbus) behind the HUD is used in xubuntu, so there is no technological blocker preventing adoption. However, work would need to be done to expose the interface in a similar way. If your truly curious, I would suggest speaking directly to the folks @ #ubuntu-unity IRC channel on freenode. I do know that while there are no plans for them to port the feature to other desktop environments, they have attempted to make it easy to do so when possible.

      Delete
  7. Thanks Nicholas, got HUD working since today afternoon... as a random tester (not a geek),

    any particular areas / scripts you would like to see tests on? - would help.

    cheers, Rohit.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Rohit, the testing at this point is not focused as the work is still on-going to finish some of the major features. What you can do right now is try it out, and give feedback on things theat act differently than you think it should and file bugs when something breaks or simply doesn't work.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Installed HUD on precise pangolin updated as of today, 3.2.0-11-generic-pae, held down Alt which asked me to type my command which I did:
    synaptic
    and got nothing. Let me try again with
    sudo synaptic

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JerryLA, the HUD is meant to be a shortcut for selecting menu items, not a command launcher. It would allow you to do things like change character encoding in firefox, simply by typing 'chinese' and having the 'View->Character Encoding->Chinese' option pop up. This would save you several keystrokes (in addition to you not having to remember where it's located :-) )

      Delete
  10. Rebooted, tried Alt, got crash:
    hud-service crashed with signal 5 in ffi_call_SYSV()
    Application Menu Indicator Bugs
    Bug #922936

    ?
    JerryLA

    ReplyDelete
  11. I hope they leave the standard toolbar as an option or else it will be bye bye mostly ubuntu to hello all Debian.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Can't get HUD to work, requesting clues please - not a geek, hence simple understandable instructions - pls?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Rohit, first make sure your running precise. Then copy and paste the 2 commands above one at a time into a terminal. They will update your version of precise to one that includes 'HUD'. If this is confusing or you're unable to get it to work, don't worry. The 'HUD' will eventually make it into ubuntu and you will be able to test and utilize it then.

      Delete
  13. i followed the steps to install hud and didn't get any error messages but it won't pop up when i hit the ALT key. i am running 12.04 32bit and i did update it. i have no idea what to to do.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. also, i am running precise 32 bit desktop.

      Delete
    2. Davey, if you want more realtime help, hit the #ubuntu-unity channel on freenode. Sorry to hear it's not working out for you. You may want to try purging the HUD ppa, then making sure everything is up to date (make sure you aren't using another conflicting ppa), then installing it again.

      Delete