Ubuntu – How to run Unity 8 on Ubuntu inside of VirtualBox

unityunity8virtualbox

Like the title suggest is there anyway?

I tried to run Unity 8 on Ubuntu 16.04 in VirtualBox with the Guest Additions installed. When I login into the Unity 8 session from LightDM it's just loads a black screen then its log me out or freezes. I also install Unity 8 though these commands:

sudo apt install unity8-desktop-session-mir
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ci-train-ppa-service/stable-phone-overlay
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Maybe I miss something to install, but when I tried to run Unity 8 in a terminal on top of Unity 7, I get the same thing. However, I get this output:

mathcubes@Ubuntu-VM:~$ unity8
Mode argument was not provided or was set to an illegal value. Using default value of --mode= "full-greeter"
file:///usr/share/unity8//OrientedShell.qml:21:1: plugin cannot be loaded for module "Unity.Screens": Cannot load library /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/qml/Unity/Screens/libunityscreensplugin.so: (libqpa-mirserver.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory) 
     import Unity.Screens 0.1 
 ^

Could I run Unity 8? Is it compatible?

Best Answer

You can't run neither mir nor wayland on virtualbox. Maybe in the future... See also the links: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/3v2tof/unity_8_in_virtualbox/, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mir/+bug/1366805, https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1118903.

EDIT(2017-13-01): You can run wayland inside virtualbox now. I have successfully launched a plasma wayland session on KDE Neon Developer Edition Git Unstable with virtualbox 5.1.12. I'm not sure about Mir. I will have to test some ubuntu 17.04 Alpha release to find out.

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