14.10 boots to wallpaper only, no panels etc.

[von Stalhein]

I've seen a bit of this about and to date no solutions.

I cobbled together a machine to tide me over while I save for a new build.

It has hdds from the old one that died, which dual booted 12.10 & XP.

It's about 18 months since I last had a desktop machine.

On upgrading to 14.10, it was all good until I installed the Radeon proprietary drivers & the MATE desktop - I'm assuming that it was one of these things that borked it.

On reboot, after login it went to the wallpaper. From there I can ctrl+alt+del but that's it.

Ive tried using the xorg command from a root to restore the default but that hasn't worked as in the past with nVidia cards I've had in machines. I tried reinstalling 14.10 but the same issue continues.

I would appreciate any pointers!

[grahammechanical]

There is a couple of things to try.

Right click the wallpaper and if a menu appears select Change Desktop Background. That will open System Settings and from there you can get to Software and Updates>Additional drivers tab and change video drivers. So, 14.04 has updated video drivers over 12.10. And your card may not be supported any more.

Run


dconf reset -f /org/compiz

to reset Compiz and to restart Unity run


setsid unity

Did you know that when we install if we tick "Install third party software" we get a proprietary video driver? But if we do not tick that box we get the open source video driver. So, if the proprietary video driver is the problem, then do not install with that box ticked. It could be the proprietary video driver at fault because the makers of video cards are in the habit of dropping support for older adapters from their drivers.

Another thing to try is to select at the Grub boot menu Advanced Options for Ubuntu and when that sub-menu opens select Recovery mode. At the recovery menu select Resume and that may load to a desktop using an open source video driver call llvmpipe. It is used as a fall back. Once at the desktop try changing video drivers.

You may find an older video driver in Software Centre.


Regards.

[ajgreeny]

It does seem likely, as grahammechanical suggested, that your graphic card is one of the many that are no longer supported by the proprietary driver.
Which card is it?

[von Stalhein]

Thanks guys.

I'll try those commands when I get home after work.

It was working perfectly after the initial upgrade from 12.10
.
The last two packages I installed were the proprietary drivers for ATI - the card is an old X300 Radeon - and the MATE desktop.

It was after the reboot to try the drivers that things went pear shaped.

I don't really want to wipe the drive unless I really have to - although I have everything backed up there are some emails since I upgraded that I wouldn't mind retrieving.

And I don't like to take the easy way out unless I have to!!

Where would I find a command to remove the proprietary drivers? That's another thing I could try I suppose?

[von Stalhein]

I gave up - I had a 250G drive and have installed Utopic to it. So far so good.

[ajgreeny]

With that graphic card stay away from the proprietary drivers as they will take you back to the same problem, I think.

Support for many older AMD cards has disappeared meaning you will have to use the open source driver that you got during installation.

[von Stalhein]

Yes, I've learnt my lesson there.

I'll concentrate on resisting my impulses to experiment with this machine and wait until the new build to start tweaking.

It's running nicely atm - the only thing I'll fiddle with will be a conky.