Unity Crash

[BJones007]

My Unity desktop just crashed a few mins ago. I enabled the desktop cube in Compiz Desktop Manager and it worked fine, but then I accidentally selected I dunno what and now nothing works. There's no panel or desktop icons, everything's gone. I tried opening the terminal, but alt + f2 doesn't work either. Am I gonna have to do a fresh install or can it be fixed. Please help.

[tordeu]

Unfortunately, I might not be able to really help you, because I don't know which compiz setting might have cause that.

What I can tell you is this:

If Alt+F2 does not work, you should be able to access a terminal with

Strg+Alt+F1And go back to the graphical interface with

Strg+Alt+F7This way, you should always be able to reach a terminal to enter stuff.

The compiz settings are in the directory

~/.gconf/apps/compizYou might not remember the exact option you changed, but do you remember where you changed something before everything broke? What is in the window with the compiz cube?

[Blasphemist]

I did this to myself a few days ago. And this is the third I've seen today on the same thing. I got the following from someone else that had the same issue.


Start ccsm and disable unity and wall. ccsm will stay open. now enable cube and rotation, then enable unity, expo and window decoration. You might need to enable more plugins(move window, resize window etc.). You need to have the latest compiz and unity

Before he sent it to me, I logged into classic and basically did these same things in ccsm (CompizConfigSettingsManager). I wasn't smart enough to do it all in just one restart. Basically, I used ccsm in classic to re-enable the unity plugin and related, logged into unity and finished getting anything back to normal, then going back to classic and getting it back to normal, such as de-selecting unity in it. This should work for you.

[Blasphemist]

BTW, as he experienced, when in the middle of this nothing seems to work in unity. No key combinations seemed to do anything, none I knew at least such as those mentioned above.

[BJones007]

Unfortunately, I might not be able to really help you, because I don't know which compiz setting might have cause that.

What I can tell you is this:

If Alt+F2 does not work, you should be able to access a terminal with

Strg+Alt+F1And go back to the graphical interface with

Strg+Alt+F7This way, you should always be able to reach a terminal to enter stuff.

The compiz settings are in the directory

~/.gconf/apps/compizYou might not remember the exact option you changed, but do you remember where you changed something before everything broke? What is in the window with the compiz cube?
Ok thanks. What I wanted to do was try to run Compiz in the terminal and restore the default settings to unity, but when I did it said

fatal: couldn't open display.
What could be the possible cause for this?

[tordeu]

Check out the post by Blasphemist above. As he has experienced this problem, the solution he posted might work for you as well.

If everything fails, uninstalling and reinstalling compiz and/or unity might be a solution before trying a complete reinstall. But as Blasphemist says, it seems to be a "common" problem.

[BJones007]

UPDATE:

I fixed it guys. What I did was ran ccsm in the terminal and switched back over to the display. The apport came up and I selected the option to restart Compiz. Once it came up I just opened the default gedit file and voila everything is back to normal once more. Thanks for the help.

[tordeu]

That was faster than I had hoped :D Glad to see it's working again.

[BJones007]

Same here. Thanks again.

FOOTNOTE:
I'm having another prolem though, but I'm gonna post it in a next thread. Hope you can help.

[Blasphemist]

UPDATE:

I fixed it guys. What I did was ran ccsm in the terminal and switched back over to the display. The apport came up and I selected the option to restart Compiz. Once it came up I just opened the default gedit file and voila everything is back to normal once more. Thanks for the help.

In my case, I couldn't get to the terminal. I'd like to know how you did it just in case I screw it up again and so I'll know if I see of someone else that has.

[BJones007]

Sure. Just press alt+ctrl+f(1-5) and login.

[laurion]

I had the same problem 5 minutes ago, and that's how to fix it:



Press
Ctrl + alt + F1 to bring up the terminal, and then login with your password and username.



Remove everything like compiz, compiz-gnome, compiz-...


sudo apt-get remove compiz
sudo apt-get remove compiz-gnome
...


Remove every piece of unity, unity-2d, unity-2d-panel, ......


sudo apt-get remove unity
sudo apt-get remove unity-2d
sudo apt-get remove unity-2d-panel
.....

Reinstall unity:
sudo apt-get install unity-2d and unity-2d-default-settings
sudo apt-get install unity-2d-default-settings
Restart the computer: sudo reboot

And that's it!

(maybe weren't all these things strictly necessary, but that's what i did and it worked)