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I have a beloved high performance 10.04 LTS 64 bit workstation, where I do serious work. I am considering doing a release upgrade to 12.04 LTS early. It seems that 10.04 LTS is not fully supported as I have to manually install a Nvidia driver, the nvidia-current not supporting my year old video adaptor.

I make heavy use of multiple displays, Gnome panel applets and the Desktop Cube, Rotate Cube and 3D Windows in the way I work. I find Unity obstructive to my style of working, are these features available after upgrading to 12.04 LTS?

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The features you list are all available, though not necessarily enabled by default. As for GNOME panel applets though, there are much fewer available for the 3.x version of gnome-panel, than existed on gnome-panel 2.x, so you may lose some, as the new version of GNOME broke API (which is why it was versioned 3.x and not 2.x), and all the applets have not been ported upstream.

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I compiz supported or is there another way of implementing the rotating cube and 3D windows? – keepitsimpleengineer Apr 28 '12 at 20:05
Compiz is used by the 3d version of Unity. If you wish to use Compiz with only the GNOME interface, you can select "GNOME Classic" at the login screen as your session. You may need to install the "gnome-session-fallback" package, and restart lightdm, for this option to appear. – dobey Apr 28 '12 at 22:48
I suppose my compiz settings will not survive the release up grade. Will I have to install/re-install compiz? – keepitsimpleengineer Apr 30 '12 at 14:26
If you are keeping your home directory around, and upgrading instead of doing a clean install, your compiz settings should remain. The compiz package is installed by default, though some extra compiz packages aren't, such as compizconfig-settings-manager. However, if you already have them installed, and are upgrading, they should remain installed after the upgrade. If some dependencies issues require they get removed during upgrade though, you may need to reinstall some of them. – dobey Apr 30 '12 at 15:12
Upgrading an 11.10 per my answer solved some of the issues. Since I never got rotating cube/3D windows working in 11.10, there was no compiz settings to be preserved. I most certainly will preserve /home when I upgrade from 10.04.4 LTS to 12.04.1. Alas, 3D windows option in ccsm for 12.04.0 is missing. – keepitsimpleengineer May 6 '12 at 20:03
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These features are not available.

There is a known bug, [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/973559][1] which renders Gnome Classic (3d) unusable.

Apparently this is a known bug since 4/4/12.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/973559

If this is happening to you, go to the bug and mark it as affecting you.

I fixed this problem (by stumbling around) for an upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04. Upgrades from 10.04 LTS are not recommended until the release of 12.04.1 (July).

Since I have other, older distributions working with Compiz, I opened ccsm from one of them and compared them to the 12.04 upgrade.

Strangely, after enabling Windows decorations, move, and re·size the problems stated is this question were solved.

By setting others from the older ccsm, I got a rotating cube.

Alas, there are no more 3D windows

UPDATE: 3D windows are available for Gnome Classic. The Compiz PluginsExtra is required. Synaptic is required to install Compiz PluginsExtra, it is not available in Ubuntu Software Center. And they work very nicely!

Screen shots of the older (10.10), working ccsm window can be seen at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/994893

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Pretty poor answer to your own question, dobey's answer is more accurate. Though not installing 12.04 seems like the best idea for you based on your use case – doug May 5 '12 at 1:49
@doug - the bug report is real, affecting 9 people at this time. – keepitsimpleengineer May 7 '12 at 16:27
Not saying it's not real but likely easy to fix & also probably only affects upgrade installs. In any event it has nothing to do with the question, everything is available & working with the possible exception of 3d windows – doug May 7 '12 at 17:19
@doug I have 3D windows working on my 12.04 Gnome Classic, very well too. I have posted at the bug report how I did it. In addition, 12.04 solved many of the problems with 11.04 and 11.10 on my Lenovo S12 Intel Atom laptop. I am now confident that when 12.04.1 is released I will have a successful upgrade of my 64bit 10.04.4 workstation. – keepitsimpleengineer May 9 '12 at 1:02
Update; I have installed Arch Linux with kdm window manager, xfce desktop and compiz, and all problems on both monitors are history, Details at askubuntu.com/questions/146908/… – keepitsimpleengineer Jun 27 '12 at 3:04

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