After crash, GUI does not load properly

[TeoBigusGeekus]

Ok, ok, I guess your system is screwed up and since I know nadda about unity and prefer to keep it this way, the only thing I can offer you is to create another user:

sudo adduser

Follow the instructions and answer all the questions.

Next, add a password for this user

sudo passwd NewUserName

Replace NewUserName with the user name you gave while executing the adduser command.
Give your new password and then

sudo EDITOR=nano visudo

Add this line at the end of the file

NewUserName ALL=(ALL) ALL

NewUserName is your new user name.

ctrl+x to exit (answer yes to save the file)

and finally

sudo reboot

Log in with your new user name and post us what happened.

[MutantJohn]

You sir, are a genius. I am logged in now as MutantJohn on my computer and I finally have my GUI back. Now that is truly awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'll definitely come back in a heartbeat if this whole thing doesn't pan out though lol.

[TeoBigusGeekus]

Wait...
...some more things to do.
If you go to /home/YourOldUserName, you can find everything you had in your old home folder.
You can copy web browser folders, pictures, videos, favourite programs' settings, etc.
After you're done, you can delete the old user with

sudo userdel -r YourOldUserName

This will delete the account as well as your old home folder.

PS: If the above mentioned folders, settings' files, etc. give you any trouble with ownership (ie. owned by YourOldUserName):

sudo chown -R YourNewUserName: /path/foldername

for folders and

sudo chown YourNewUserName: /path/filename

for files.

[sergio91pt]

My best guess is that the problem is on your compiz config, so can you try this on your old account:

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compiz-1
unity --reset

[crozar]

ive got the same issue, my unity dock is gone after making an update from the update manager , really weird , ive made a new user it works now , but restarting compiz didnt help

unity-panel-service: no process found

warning: no Display variable set, setting it to 0 unity-panel-service: no process found

these are the errors i took note of what happens after trying to resset unity or restart compiz and anything else.

i even tried to run unity

[autra]

Indeed, I am always very careful while playing with compiz, because it is still quite buggy. Some options are juste incompatible with each other, and sometimes you don't know it, and some other will work on a friend's computer, and just make yours crash... (because of graphic cards drivers, of random quality on Linux)
So I also had this kind of trouble a couple of time.
My technic is to:
-Install Unity 2D, to be able to have a GUI in case of compiz crash
-Or keep gnome 2 without compiz (then you can choose which GUI to use at login, be careful Gnome 3 and unity are NOT compatible)
-Do one change at a time, and write in my mind all that I did (and all the conflicts it raises) to be able to roll back.
-Then if you have a problem, you log in with a non-compiz gui to start ccsm and try to solve things up. You can also edit conf files yourself in command line, but it takes much more time to figure out where things are, so you might want to avoid this (though I had to deactivate compiz by editing one file once - can't remember where - before I had a gui without compiz)

To conclude, it's normal changing of user solved the problem (you seems to have been surprised of that in your mail). This is typically a conf problem (which should not happen, I agree!)
And yes, the graphical layer is on top of pretty much everything. That's cool, because you can't rely to gui as much as command line environment, therefore you always have a way to get out of trouble.

Congrats for solving this anyway !

[yzarc1]

I had this problem, and I found a solution which eliminates the need to create a new user.

My file ~/.config/compiz-1/compizconfig/config contained

[general_ubuntu]
profile = 

[gnome_session]
profile =

My solution was

cd ~/.config/compiz-1/compizconfig/ ; mv config config.old

after which I could log in. No need to create a new user.