Applications and menu gone

[argoz17]

So I have a huge issue and i am not sure what happened. I updated my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machine a few days ago. And since then i haven't done much outside of browsing the web. But I wanted to play my favorite Atari2600 emulator, so i clicked on the Ubuntu logo and brought up the dash, i went to "Apps" and nothing showed up. All my apps are gone. The menu itself is blank!

Perhaps the update had something go wrong, I am doing a second update as i am writing this praying the problem is fixed. Any ideas what happened to my apps and app menu. All i can access is what is pined to my dock.

Any help will be gladly accepted, thanks c:

[papibe]

Hi argoz17.

What version did you upgrade from?

Is this your first experience using the Unity desktop?

Regards.

[sudodus]

Can you start a terminal window with the hotkey combination?

ctrl + alt + t

Then you can run any program from there (if you know its name). It might be worthwhile to run some repair commands.

[argoz17]

It wasn't an upgrade, just a 200 or so megabyte update. My install was 12.04 and it is still 12.04. And no, I have been using ubuntu since 10.04LTS so I experienced Unity from 11.04. i have never encountered a problem like this...well at least a problem on just a update, if that is the problem.

Thank you for the responce

[argoz17]

I know I can do that but it is rather sucky doing that for every program on the computer....can the whole app menu be repaired via comand line?

Thank you for the input

[papibe]

The thing I can think of is to reset Unity.

Take a look at the section called 'Reset Unity/Compiz' at this tutorial.

Let us know how it goes.
Regards.

[Frogs Hair]

Open the terminal and try the following.

unity --reset

[argoz17]

That did nothing, just set it all back to default...see my problem is, everything works fine..my file system, any applications I can use, desktop environment works great no issues...except the applications section on the dash is empty....it doesn't even have the filter tab, it has a search bar and a big empty dash. I am at a loss D:

[dino99]

purge both unity & compiz, then reinstall them both starting with compiz

[kostkon]

Could you paste here the contents of the dpkg log?

gedit /var/log/dpkg.log

maybe there is something wrong with the applications lens.