12.04 hosed

[macminiuser]

I do not know what to do now Iinstalled the last updates for unbuntu 12.04 and my system is hosed, compiz is messed up ,There is no launcher on the side no menus no nothing just my wallpaper.I don't wanna lose all my emails and stuff. is there any hope?

[IWantFroyo]

Hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 and sign in. Then, run:

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

This will install a different desktop (LXDE), which you can then sign into after rebooting. Hopefully you'll get your window manager and a panel.

If this doesn't work then I would hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 again, sign in, and then just use elinks, cp or ftp to move all your files off your computer. If you're using a standard email client then their should be a Mail or .mail folder in your ~/
I would plug in a USB drive and

cp -R Mail /media/nameofusb

. You can use ls to determine what's in the folders, like the name of your USB.

[macminiuser]

Thank you I will try that, I forgot tomention that I used DEja Dupe to backup my home folder to another drive. I don't know if that would fix the problem if I restored it from backup?

[haqking]

12.04 is still in beta and should only be used for testing and not for a live production system, any update is likely to hose your system thats why is in beta, to be tested.

And always have backups of your data.

Peace

[macminiuser]

I have several backups from yesterday on back

[IWantFroyo]

If it's just your home folder, then that won't help you restore your system. Do you have a separate /home partition?

[macminiuser]

No, Thats where I screwed up at.

[macminiuser]

Is there anyway to open up my home folder without an icon ihave a few icons on my desktop like trash firefox but thats it. I can open up my settings folder

[macminiuser]

Ok I managed to open up overview in settings and ran update manager it installed updates again so we'll see what happens

[macminiuser]

how do you bring up a terminal on the desktop? is there keyboard shortcuts?