In 13.10 my tool bar and menu bar has gone missing

[jds340]

I'm using 13.10, this morning after waking up from suspend mode the unity tool bar was missing and the top menu bar was missing. Which means I can't start any programmes and can't shutdown the system without turning it off. If I do turn it off and then log in with the guest account that has the same problem.

How can I get my unity and menu bars back?

[deadflowr]

It sounds like a the unity plugin is disabled.
If you can still get a terminal try this(ctrl +alt+T)
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/10/how-to-reset-compiz-and-unity-in-ubuntu.html

[jds340]

Nope, I can't get a terminal. Sadly I didn't think to set things up to be able to ssh into the laptop, otherwise I'd go that route.

The only things I can do is anything I can get to via right click on the desktop, which is open settings and get nautilus open by right click create folder, then open the folder, which opens nautilus. Using that method I created a new shell script, set the permissions to be executable, and then tried to run it, but that doesn't work. It just says it can't locate the programme. Although I can get a browser open by selecting a file and then open with Chrome or FF, and from that I can see that the machine can link to the outside world, but it can't connect to a shared drive either via sftp or samba.

So the whole thing is totally f***ed. How I got into such a state I've no idea but it is very worrying that this kind of thing can happen. I'm going to try a few other things with Nautilus to see what programmes I can run, hopefully something will get me get a command line to reset the Unity system. Failing that, via settings I can get backup running, so I might just save what I need off to a thumb drive, and re-install Ubuntu, which is a very big pain.

[deadflowr]

If you can do the above of making chrome or ff launch through the create folder shenanigans then you should be able to do the same for a terminal launcher.
Try this
1)Create a document
2)open document
3)put this in it

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Terminal
Exec=gnome-terminal
Type=Application
Icon=Terminal

save it, and when giving it a name, make sure it has the .desktop extension.(something like quickfixterminal.desktop)
I would recommend saving it in the Desktop folder, that way it'll be on the desktop and not hiding away somewhere, making it easy access.
Then just make it executable and then launch it.

[jds340]

Good advice, but it didn't work, I get 'there was an error launching the application'.

[deadflowr]

Good advice, but it didn't work, I get 'there was an error launching the application'.

That feels like you have a space in the gnome-terminal command.
It should be one long word, without any space.
Or else use the whole path

/usr/bin/gnome-terminal
Make sure there qare no spaces in between the words and - symbol.

[jds340]

Mmm, when I looked in /usr/bin gnome-terminal was missing. Which is very strange. But I copied it over from another machine using a thumb drive. Once I'd done that I could then open a terminal OK. With a terminal open I then did


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install unity


During the reinstall I got a request to auto-remove a whole lot of files, which I did. It also complained about not being able to register sonic-visualizer.

So now I've got unity back, with the launcher and top menu bar, and windows now have little controls on them, it appears to be back to normal, though it's completely uninstalled VirtualBox, which is also a bit strange.

It's a bit worrying that Ubuntu can get into this state, and that gnome-terminal was deleted

Thanks for the help

[kaspin2]

For what it's worth I had this problem after updating from kubuntu12.04(Gnome-classic desktop) to Ubuntu13.04 (yes, I know that it was foolish). After trying the above solutions, and others, unsuccessfully, I brought up the terminal (ctr+alt+t) and input:
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback
gnome-session-quit
This brought up the logon window, where I clicked on the little Ubuntu logo, and changed to the Gnome flashback option (Gnome-classic wasn't there). Hey presto my top and bottom trays were there....Kaspin