only background and cursor on desktop

[Joseph Miller]

Recently installed ubuntu 10.01 on an old dell optiplex, originally worked fine yesterday then i rebooted, since rebooting i have had nothing on my desktop except the mouse cursor and background image. luckily F2 brings up the help menu and i am able to get to the internet from there.

If anyone could help me to solve the problem of not having much of a desktop i would really be thankful.

[pastalavista]

Try Alt-F2 and enter 'gnome-panel' ...forum rules say no double posting. Careful or a Mod will bust you

you didn't say Alt-f2 worked in the other post though, so maybe you can slide this time.. we'll see ;)

[Piconzaz]

Hello,

I installed 10.04 last week and so far everything went just fine.
From today, I've been experiencing the very same problem as the original poster described.

Launching gnome-panel with alt-F2 does not solve it.
Oddly enough, the problem does not reproduce when I select the "safe session gnome" (session de secours in french, which is the language my ubuntu is set).
This may be a temporary solution for the original poster too...

I tried to reinstall gdm and gnome-panel but this does not solve anything.

I have no clue what might have caused this. I may have installed some suggested updates yesterday, before this problem occured, but nothing more I can think of.

This is a very annoying problem though it seems very superficial.

If you have any clue about what may cause this, please keep us updated.

Thanks

[pastalavista]

The only time I ever encountered this problem on an old Acer laptop with ATI graphics and the only solution I could find was to add 'gnome-panel' and 'compiz' to the Startup menu [System->Preferences->Startup Applications] while in safe mode.