Unity 8 is one of the hottest things coming inside 2014 both for mobile devices and Ubuntu desktop boxes. Unity 8 will run on a new display server, called Mir, made by Canonical.

It will use a Qt/QML SDK for building applications, and it will provide an unified run-time environment across all devices, Mobiles, Tablets and Desktops/Laptops. That means applications should run in all platforms without extra porting work.

I guess you already know everything about Unity 8, but for the people that don’t have an Ubuntu OS to actually try it, here is how it looks like.

I am not quite aware what exactly are trying to do in Canonical, but I’m imaging that Unity 8 in desktops will replace the Unity 7 Dash, and it won’t be full screen as in Mobiles. I might be wrong on this.

Unity 8 will come as default most probably in Ubuntu 14.10, in October 2014.

Building and Running in Vbox

You can install and run Unity 8 as easy as:

$ sudo apt-get install unity8

$ unity8

That will work at least for Ubuntu 14.10 installations, and you might need to add a PPA if you running 13.10.

Building from sources

Building Unity from sources is actually 2-3 commands. But it requires 14.04 only!

You can see the building instructions at Ubuntu Wiki:

https://unity.ubuntu.com/getinvolved/development/unity8/

Running in VBox

To run Unity 8 in Virtual Box, you must disable the 3d acceleration from VBox options.