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View Full Version : [ubuntu] Unity Randomly Failing



IdolizingStewie
January 9th, 2012, 01:40 AM
After about a 4 year hiatus running Windows, I returned to Ubuntu last fall. Things have obviously changed quite a bit since then, and what skills I have are quite rusty.

I am running stock 11.10 - I originally installed 11.04, but 11.10 came out the next day, so I upgraded from a completely stock 11.04 installation.

Periodically, the whole desktop will freeze for about 10 seconds, menus will momentarily look like something out of Win2k (rendering the menu bar too wide to be displayed, pushing the system setting/shutdown icon off the edge of the screen), and some of the icons on the launcher will lose their little picture and be replaced by a generic icon that looks like a window. Some of the icons will remain the same - Firefox, for one, but others will change - the Workspace Switcher, my portable HDD, Keepass, etc. I also notice that my terminal session running Folding@Home goes grey.

Most of the time, everything will switch back before I can use the computer again, but sometimes it just stays that way. The only way I've found to fix it is to reboot (Windows habits die hard).

I tried running unity --reset in terminal, but that renders a lot of warnings, hangs after Setting Update "run_key", and now i have no launcher at all.

Any ideas on how to fix this? I will try to get a screenshot up later, but since my attempted fix mucked things up worse, I'll have to wait until the behavior repeats itself. At least the computer is still usable, it's just annoying.

IdolizingStewie
January 9th, 2012, 02:11 AM
OK, got a screenshot now. You can see the affected icons on the launcher and the menubar. The program menus seem to be somewhat repaired by the terminal command, which has issued several more warnings in the past few minutes, but not done much else.

mörgæs
January 9th, 2012, 10:35 AM
Welcome back.

Please give a complete hardware description.
How does Ubuntu 11.10 work in a live boot? If it is equally unstable, have you tried Xubuntu?

(I also began with Ubuntu 5.10 - quite a few changes from that time...)