Install MyUnity On Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

Version 1.0
Author: Christian Schmalfeld <c [dot] schmalfeld [at] projektfarm [dot] de>

This tutorial shows how you can install MyUnity, the extended Unity desktop configuration tool, on Linux Mint 13. MyUnity can usually only be used on Ubuntu operating systems, however you can get it to run under Mint as well with a little source-file customization.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

MyUnity was originally designed to work only with Ubuntu systems. It is possible that you run into problems and errors using it on Mint - none have occured to me until now though.

In this tutorial, I assume you have already installed the Unity desktop. If not, install it by entering the following into a terminal:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

During installation, you will be asked which login-manager you would like to use. mdm is the one Mint 12 uses by default, lightdm is the one Ubuntu uses. I find lightdm more appealing and therefore set it as default:

2 Downloading MyUnity Source Files

We need to alter one of MyUnity's source files, so we also need to compile it ourselves. If you have already installed any version of MyUnity you need to uninstall it first. Open a terminal (Dash > Installed Applications > Terminal) and enter following:

sudo apt-get remove myunity

Afterwards change to the Downloads directory:

cd ~/Downloads

su

Then it's time to download MyUnity's sources and install the tools you need for compiling and editing:

wget https://launchpad.net/myunity/trunk/3.0/+download/myunity-3.1.5.tar.gz
tar -zxvf myunity-3.1.5.tar.gz
cd ./myunity-3.1.5/
apt-get install gambas2-dev gambas2-gb-gtk gambas2-gb-form gambas2-gb-gtk-ext build-essential vim-nox

3 Compiling

Now that we have everything, we can modify the appropriate source file so that it recognizes our operating system as Ubuntu 12.04. We can do this by setting a new value for a single variable. Open Main.module and look for the line Uversion = Right$(Tmp_split[1], 5). Replace it with the following line:

vi Main.module

[...]
Uversion = "12.04" ’Uversion = Right$(Tmp_split[1], 5)
[...]

Afterwards save and quit. We are now ready to compile. Do so by entering the following:

make
make install
exit

Although we are done now, you will probably still get an error when you try to run MyUnity. For it to go away, you can try to reboot or run it with different users; it is only temporary and at some time it's supposed to go away. Remember however that it must be run as the user logged into the desktop session to work properly. To run MyUnity, just enter the name into a terminal: