When I’m starting up the editor, it’s just getting stuck on a black “recent” window that I cannot do anything with. If I try to close the window, it just closes the unity screen. I’ve tried waiting, I’ve tried restarting the editor, and nothing seems to be making it work.
Run mkrdr -p ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages
You may have to install npm as well (sudo apt-get install npm).
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Thanks, but I found the same bug in another thread which had the same solution. It works now 
For those that haven’t found the other thread, here it is Grey Screen in unity3D v. 5.3.1f1 - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions
In essence, the possible fixes are:
- Create the folder/folders “~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages”, for example with “mkdir -p ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages”
- Install NPM (and/or NodeJS)
- If that doesn’t work, try to get a more recent NPM/NodeJS
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Can confirm that all I needed was to mkdir Packages
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Hi all. I made the changes and created the directories, but no luck. My linux is default Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.(desktop 64 bits).
When I launch the app in admin mode with sudo, the system completely logs out.
When I use the icon from the default installation, unity says it cant copy the files to ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages directory and then keeps the black/gray empty window and I have to close the app.
I’ve got NodeJS and NPM from the default installation of ubuntu, but I would like to know if this could be a permission problem in order not to change too much the clean installation of ubuntu.
I tested Glmark2 and could see all the test correctly so legacy opengl works well.
Thanks.
If you’ve launched once using sudo, some files and/or directories may have been created with the wrong ownership.
Your best bet is to remove ~/.local/share/unity3d , ~/.cache/unity3d , and carefully clean editor-related stuff from ~/.config/unity3d without losing stored preferences from your installed Unity games.
As of the 20160208 build, the npm package directory should be getting created the first time it’s needed - if it’s still not, you may be triggering some code path I wasn’t able to locate during my testing.
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Thanks. I did all those steps and I get the same. I should say the only thing I have installed on this system is flash and mesa-utils. So its clean and no unity games installed on it (yet).
One thing I mentioned is that Im new to unity. Im no programmer (I was in the past) but I wanted to test the linux version so I could test my assets on it. (Im trying to create content on linux for the asset store (3d art))
Should I test some test file or something? May be I should have and I forgot. I though I could run the editor and create from there putting the content and doing a run test.
PD. Sorry for my english.(non native speaker here)
I will wait and see if I can help to fix the issue… as It looks Im the only one having it 
cheers.
I repost to post the solution… all this after instalation using ubuntu software center.
I was using the file manager that ubuntu uses and saw that unity3d folder on the ~/.local one was protected and created by root. I deleted as root on console, then on the filemanager visually copied the contents of opt/unity/packages/whatever and made the folder again using the file manager (me(literal) and group:(my default ubuntu username) as my user group). That made the trick. Dont forget to press control+H because this is the only way to change permissions of the occult files on the visual ubuntu filemanager.
It looks like there is some mistake with the permissions, may be software center is not perfect from clean install. The problem was permissions on the folder unity3d from ~/.local/share were wrong and even copying everything by hand as root didnt work and unity would not launch. Doing it from the filemanager fix everything, why? I dont know, still learning ubuntu and linux.
Anyway, its solved now, and works well.
Thanks.
I had the same issue with unity 5.3.2f1 but the missing directory was in ~/.data.
mkdir -p ~/.data/unity3d/Unity
igwan: do you have special settings for your XDG_ environment variables?
I had this problem as well. I discovered in the editor log file that it was looking for a file called node in /usr/bin. Nodejs, when I’d installed it, created itself as nodejs, not node. Creating a symbolic link to nodejs called node appears to have fixed the problem.
I can confirm that I had to make ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages and also ~/.data/unity3d/Unity
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Also I had same problem and “mkdir -p ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages” fix it.
Ubuntu 16.04
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I had a similar issue which was, it turns out, caused by an uncompleted installation due to unsatisfied dependencies (Ubuntu 14.04). After apt-get installing the dependencies, reinstalling the deb did the trick for me.
My XDG_ variables are the defaults :
$ eval echo $XDG_{CACHE,CONFIG,DATA}_HOME
/home/igwan/.cache/ /home/igwan/.config/ /home/igwan/.data/
But I now realize its redundant to set them to their default values: debian - Where should the XDG_CONFIG_HOME variable be defined? - Super User
Fixed it for BunsenLabs RC2.
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the first ( creating the folders) worked for me!, thank you
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$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages
Worked like a charm (Linux Mint 17.3)
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I’ve tried the solution suggested above:
$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/unity3d/Packages
But it doesn’t fix it for me, still getting the errors on load about Unity failing to copy files over. Going to try to reinstall the .deb
my version of NPM is current as far as I can tell.
After checking over the dependencies, ones which had a required version number added, I found that in the Synaptic package manager that ‘debconf’ ver. 1.5.51ubuntu2 is installed, but debconf-2.0 isn’t found for me, so not sure if that’s also part of the problem.
My friend also running Linux Mint 17.3 has managed to boot up Unity fully, after creating the Packages directory, but that didn’t work for me.