10.4->10.10 renders system unusable

[razhov]

After doing the standard sequence to go from 10.4 to 10.10 beta, the system is now unusable.
There are no icons and no themes. The GDM login shows a big question mark where a graphics would normally be.
When I log into the session, I get nothing: no desktop, no panels. Alt+F2 does nothing, so I can't even launch a terminal that way.
After starting a terminal from a virtual console, I can start looking at what's wrong. Metacity crashes right away with:
metacity:ERROR:ui/ui.c:752:meta_ui_get_default_window_icon: assertion failed: (default_icon)
Aborted (core dumped)

Any hints on how to proceed?

[tommcd]

I always do clean installs of Ubuntu. Doing dist-upgrades is risky at best. When doing a dist-upgrade to a beta build of Ubuntu, you are asking for trouble. This is especially true for all the people who have a boatload of 3rd party repos in their sources.list. Are you one of them?

The fastest and most trouble free path to success here would be to do a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

In the future, if you are not prepared to deal with problems like this, you should avoid development releases and only use stable versions of Ubuntu.

[Mark Phelps]

After doing the standard sequence to go from 10.4 to 10.10 beta, the system is now unusable.
This is not really a "standard sequence", it is instead, a "risky sequence". Betas, while made available to the whole community, are really only intended for experts with lots of experience in testing and configuring Ubuntu.

And, unfortunately, there is nothing like "System Restore" that you can run to roll-back to the working version you had before.

Sorry, but you're faced with a complete re-install -- and if you're not an Ubuntu expert, I would stay away from 10.10 until it is released.