danemaslen
August 28th, 2014, 04:28 PM
Hardware: Dell Latitude 2110
Current Ubuntu version: 14.04
Previous version 12.04
In 12.04 I used Gnome Classic (No Effects) as my desktop environment.
Today I accepted the 14.04.1 upgrade. It proceeded without any apparent errors. Following the reboot the login screen appeared correctly, I logged in successfully, and was pleased to see that my desktop environment appeared to be unchanged (in 12.04 I had Gnome Classic configured with just a top panel and that was indeed how my desktop environment appeared at this stage). There were, however, some error messages (something I'm accustomed to after Ubuntu upgrades), so I thought it would be wise to run Update Manager to see if there were any updates available. It was at this stage that I noticed the first oddity: Update Manager didn't appear in its usual place under System Tools — Administration. Indeed it didn't appear anywhere, so I had to run it from a terminal window. It requested that I do a partial upgrade. This wasn't something I'd ever encountered on previous upgrades, but I did so, rebooted, and then encountered problems with the Gnome Flashback desktop environments.
At the login screen I am offered four choices:
GNOME
GNOME Flashback (Compiz)
GNOME Flackback (Metacity)
Ubuntu (Default)
As far as I can tell (I have no idea how the new GNOME desktop environment is supposed to work and I have always minimised my exposure to Unity) GNOME and Ubuntu (Default) work correctly, but the two GNOME Flashback options just display the desktop, i.e. no top panel.
I have been rummaging in search of a solution. The thread
http://askubuntu.com/questions/459551/gnome-flashback-panels-not-starting-in-ubuntu-14-04
seemed promising but when I tried its suggestion of running gnome-panel, I got the message
Cannot register the panel shell: there is one already running
Any ideas? It occurs to me that maybe my desktop environment configuration has been corrupted such that it specifies no panels. While awaiting a reply to this post, I shall attempt to refresh my memory about how the desktop environment configuration can be handled from the command line.
Current Ubuntu version: 14.04
Previous version 12.04
In 12.04 I used Gnome Classic (No Effects) as my desktop environment.
Today I accepted the 14.04.1 upgrade. It proceeded without any apparent errors. Following the reboot the login screen appeared correctly, I logged in successfully, and was pleased to see that my desktop environment appeared to be unchanged (in 12.04 I had Gnome Classic configured with just a top panel and that was indeed how my desktop environment appeared at this stage). There were, however, some error messages (something I'm accustomed to after Ubuntu upgrades), so I thought it would be wise to run Update Manager to see if there were any updates available. It was at this stage that I noticed the first oddity: Update Manager didn't appear in its usual place under System Tools — Administration. Indeed it didn't appear anywhere, so I had to run it from a terminal window. It requested that I do a partial upgrade. This wasn't something I'd ever encountered on previous upgrades, but I did so, rebooted, and then encountered problems with the Gnome Flashback desktop environments.
At the login screen I am offered four choices:
GNOME
GNOME Flashback (Compiz)
GNOME Flackback (Metacity)
Ubuntu (Default)
As far as I can tell (I have no idea how the new GNOME desktop environment is supposed to work and I have always minimised my exposure to Unity) GNOME and Ubuntu (Default) work correctly, but the two GNOME Flashback options just display the desktop, i.e. no top panel.
I have been rummaging in search of a solution. The thread
http://askubuntu.com/questions/459551/gnome-flashback-panels-not-starting-in-ubuntu-14-04
seemed promising but when I tried its suggestion of running gnome-panel, I got the message
Cannot register the panel shell: there is one already running
Any ideas? It occurs to me that maybe my desktop environment configuration has been corrupted such that it specifies no panels. While awaiting a reply to this post, I shall attempt to refresh my memory about how the desktop environment configuration can be handled from the command line.