Ubuntu Wiki

Building Unity from Source

You'll need a fully updated Natty system, with the latest compiz and bamfdaemon packages installed.

You'll then need to do do this:

sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libcairo2-dev libpng12-dev libglew1.5-dev  libglewmx1.5-dev libxxf86vm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libpango1.0-dev doxygen cmake build-essential debhelper pkg-config valac intltool libgee-dev libunique-dev libclutter-1.0-dev libclutter-gtk-0.10-dev libclutk-dev libbamf-dev gsettings-desktop-schemas-dev libgconf2-dev  libglib2.0-dev libdbusmenu-glib-dev libgnome-desktop-dev libgtk2.0-dev libpango1.0-dev libgnomeui-dev libdee-dev libindicator-dev  libunity-misc-dev libutouch-grail-dev libxcb-icccm1-dev compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-dev libboost-dev libboost-serialization-dev libmetacity-dev python-dev cython gnome-common libpcre3-dev 

to get all the dependencies.

You will probably need to grab the latest version of Nux to get Unity trunk going:

bzr branch lp:nux
cd nux
./autogen.sh --disable-documentation --prefix=/opt/unity
make
sudo make install

• Tip: Most modern desktops and laptops have several cores. You can greatly speed up the compilation by taking advantage of this. The make command have build in support for this which you can activate using the -jN switch where N is the number of jobs to run in parallel. A good rule of thumb is to run 2 times the number of cores on your processor. Thus on a normal dual core computer you should run make -j4 to minimize the compilation time.

exporting paths:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/unity/lib/pkgconfig:${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/unity/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_RUN_PATH=/opt/unity/lib:${LD_RUN_PATH}

and then Unity:

bzr branch lp:unity
cd unity
mkdir build; cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCOMPIZ_PLUGIN_INSTALL_TYPE=package -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/unity
make
sudo make install

unsetting paths:

unset PKG_CONFIG_PATH
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
unset LD_RUN_PATH

add this to your /home/$USER/.bashrc

function compiz-unity-setup-env
{
    export PATH=/opt/unity/bin:${PATH}
    export PYTHONPATH=/opt/unity/lib/python2.7/site-packages
}

and finally, once that's installed, you can log out and log in and again and then run compiz-unity-setup-env and then restart Compiz (compiz --replace) and then use CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) to search for and enable the Unity plugin!