Ubuntu 14.04 very slow - suggestions?

Parallels desktop 9.0.24229, older Mac Pro with 4x 2.66 Xeon, OS X 10.7.5.
Installed Ubuntu 14.04 and everything screen-related is extremely slow - unity takes seconds to open its search screen.
VM has 1GB memory, 256MB video ram.
Suggestions?

Edit: I note on my CPU meter, hardly anything is happening, just a trickle of activity while ubuntu is struggling to repaint a window.

Edit again: Configuring video with 3D acceleration on and vertical synchronization off seems to be the best but is still sloooooow.

YAEdit: I have completed installation of Kubuntu 14.04 and it does not seem to be afflicted with the slows. So the problem relates to Ubuntu Unity under Parallels 9.

 

Hello dcortesi,

Please follow the steps as suggested at http://kb.parallels.com/121300 and let us know how it works.!

 

Yes, this appears to have fixed, or at least improved, the performance. Thank you!

I only searched in the forums, I should have searched the support files as well. For anybody else who searches only forums for this issue, here is the meat of it:

1. After installing Parallels tools, there should be a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf but there is not. There is instead /etc/X11/xorg.conf.xxxxxxx where a date is appended to the filename. So step 1 is to mv or cp xorg.conf.* to xorg.conf (this was covered in another forum post that I did find.)

(This step also fixes the problem where the Ubuntu Settings app displays only the default screen resolution. You can define additional screen resolutions in xorg.conf, see the "Parallels Screen Section" in that file.)

2. Issue these two commands:

export DISPLAY=:0

gsettings reset org.compiz.core:/org/compiz/profiles/unity/plugins/core/ active-plugins

 

Just a note to anyone unsatisfied with Ubuntu performance in a Parallels VM -- I have installed and given VERY BRIEF tests to Ubuntu 14.04, Kubuntu 14.04, and Lubuntu 14.04. Of the three, Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/) is by far the fastest and simplest. It is not the prettiest nor the most feature-rich but my golly the response-time difference from Ubuntu (even after the above fix) is remarkable.

Both Kubuntu and Lubuntu accept the Parallels Tools install, and both need the xorg fix mentioned above before you can see a choice of monitor resolutions.

 

Hi dcortesi, thanks for info, now I'm wondering if ubuntu 14 via parallels on mbpro'11 - fits my needs. I'm programming multithreaded applications in java in Ubuntu. The main question - is Ubuntu performance in this case becuase I use an intensive IDE (IntellijIdea), databases like mongodb, bigdata tools etc)