12.04 Classic has Unity Launchers, no Menus. Is this right?System Problem Errors

[bogan]

Hi!, All,

Sorry this is inevitably a bit long as it is complex.

In 11.10 I am accustomed to run Gnome Classic with Unity 2D Launcher as well, giving me the best of both worlds, but it seems impossible to set 12.04 up in the same way.

For four days after an Update Manager upgrade from 11.10 - which went well except for Theme 'White on White' text colour problems and a repeated " could not write bytes: broken pipe" message - the situation was as follows:

when logged in as Gnome Classic there were no traditional Menus, but the 3D Launcher Icons were there in the left-hand panel. But see Edit note below.

There was also a Gnome 2 type bottom panel, but that seemed to be the only visible difference from logging in as Ubuntu.
Gome fallback session is installed and running, and there is no Unity Plug-in shown in System Settings.

[In fact I did have Menus, because I have the ClassicMenuIndicator installed, but quite a few of the options do nothing eg Appearance and Unity2D Launcher.]

However, the menus were there as expected when logged-in as 'Classic no effects', but running 'Unity 2D Launcher' returns an Error Widget saying "could not launch 'Unity 2D Launcher' Failed to execute child process "unity-2D-launcher": (No such file or directory.)"

This despite logging in to both Ubuntu & Ubuntu 2D working as I would have expected.

 ps ax | grep unity

shows both ''unity-2d-shell and 'unity-2d-panel' to be running, and

apt-get install unity-2d-launcher  #   returns: 
....unity-2d-launcher is already the latest version....

I had periodic uninformative "Sorry, 12.04 has encountered an internal problem" messages, but clicking 'Details' only gave path, and performance did not seem to be affected.

But, suddenly, whilst preparing this Post and frequently switching back and forth between the display choices at login, every thing changed. First I got a series of system failure messages every few minutes,

" System Program Problem Detected:"

though again the system continued to run OK.

Then I found that the Launchers no longer showed in Classic but the Menus had appeared for the first time. Though Ubuntu 2D was still as expected - (there was a monitor Icon top right in the toolbar in place of a gear or my username, which I had not previously noticed) - but logging into Ubuntu gave only Unity 2D.

I cold booted several times, ran 'apt-get unity --reset', which gave a lot of errors and quit,

 unity --reset

(process:5084): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
//bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally with the following error: No protocol specified
No protocol specified
Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/unity", line 222, in <module>
    reset_unity_compiz_profile ()
  File "/usr/bin/unity", line 84, in reset_unity_compiz_profile
    except (GError, AttributeError), e:
NameError: global name 'GError' is not defined

so I ran

 sudo apt-get remove --purge unity

and rebooted, then reinstalled unity.

So far - two hours worth - I have had no more system program problems -- Woops -- after re -running 'unity --reset', which gave the same errors as before, I got another system message.

Can anyone suggest what might be the cause and cure for this mix-up.?

Especially, what do you get when logged into Gnome Classic?? Menus and/or Launchers??

Edit: The Unity Plug-in has gone from System Settings when logged in to Ubuntu 3D as well.

Edit2: The Classic Menus were there all the time, but were covered by the Global menu and hence were both - almost - invisible and not responsive to mouse Clicks. In Classic No Effects I had added several Launcher Icons to the top Panel, hence their dimmed out images were now visible in Classic also, but not useable.
Chao!, bogan.

[bogan]

Hi! All,
Things go from bad to worse!
The 'System Program Problem Detected' messages have multiplied - at least one of them was an Unity crash, and there have been a lot of "Unity has closed unexpectedly" messages, though most times the 3D Display has continued apparently OK.

One result of Unity not running was to reveal the reason I had never seen the traditional menus when logged in to Classic. They had been there all the time, hidden behind the app title or Global Menu.
Icons I had added to the top panel in 'Classic No Effects' were now partly visible, but unusable in Classic.

I have edited Post #1 as follows:

The Classic Menus were there all the time, but were covered by the Global menu and hence were both - almost - invisible and not responsive to mouse Clicks. In Classic No Effects I had added several Launcher Icons to the top Panel, hence their dimmed out images were now visible in Classic also, but not usable.

To be sure this spate of error messages was not a symptom of the nvidia driver holocast, I downgraded to 290.10, but the result was not any improvement, so I reverted to 295.33.

Apart from purging and re-installing Unity, I have also tried using a different, newer monitor, but that did not help either.

The next step is to change the GT 7650 card for a GTS 210 card to eliminate that as a cause.

Has anyone got any other ideas to try??

Chao!, bogan.

[bogan]

Hi!, All,
I Posted

: The next step is to change the GT 7650 card for a GTS 210 card to eliminate the [current nvidia driver hiatus as a] possible cause.

That was a total bummer! The G310 card was evidently incompatible with the Bios.

On switching on, after the Medion/Intel screens - in which pressing the F1/Del/F8/F12 keys did nothing to effect the next display - a black screen opened with a blue unidentifiable logo top-left and a large Yellow "Energy Saver" logo top-right.

That stayed fixed for more than three minutes, followed by a series of test reports on memory, CPU, storage and USB hardware, laboriously displayed at an excruciatingly slow rate - 3 secs per character! - and across the bottom of the screen: "Press F1 for Start-up: F8 for Boot Menu: 'ESC' to avoid Memory Test."

None of which did anything whilst the checking went on; eventually, F8 was the only one that worked, and then I was only able to boot from a LiveUSB; but at least that showed the card was working correctly.

A total of more than 20 minutes from switching-on to full 11.10 GUI screen.

I gave up on that idea and reinstalled the original GT7650 card. I also reverted from a 21" Touch Screen Monitor to the previously successfully used 19" with a DVI connection. I had changed because I noticed in one of the Log files, a incorrect Warning that the 19" Medion MDS30699PU was not 3D capable. Changing made no difference to the number of "System Program Problem Detected" and "Sorry, 12.04 has encountered a difficulty" messages, nor did it stop the "Could not write bytes: Broken pipe" line, which shows at every log-in or shut-down.

Next step is to run:

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

It says it will take a long time! We shall see.

Chao!, bogan.

[bogan]

Hi!, All,

I ran:

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

It said it will take a long time, but in fact, it only took about 20 minutes! The only difficulty was that the terminal cursor just sat there, with no reports or anything to show activity.

Eventually the terminal prompt returned with nothing reported on the screen.

I rebooted; the "could not write bytes: Broken Pipe" message was still shown and

sudo unity --reset

still produced a long list of errors; but for the last 36 hours, with multiple reboots and logins to all the display options, I HAVE NOT - touch wood - HAD EVEN ONE "System Program Problem Detected", nor a "Sorry, 12.04 LTS has encountered an unexpected difficulty", nor a Crash report message, and Unity has continued to run without any visible problems.

Edit1:I spoke [typed] too soon about no more crash reports: I re-ran:

 sudo unity --reset

and it gave the usual long string of errors and, as before, hung up at:

Setting Update "run_key"
Couldn't find a perfect decorator match; trying all decorators
Starting gtk-window-decorator

When, after 10 mins, I pressed Ctrl+C. it displayed:

WARN  2012-05-03 19:48:41 unity <unknown>:0 Unable to fetch children: No such interface `org.ayatana.bamf.view' on object at path /org/ayatana/bamf/application1932146384

A few minutes later I got a: "Sorry, the application 'unity-lens-video' has closed unexpectedly" message, and that was in Gnome Classic, so unity was not even supposed to be running.

Although I have had no suggestions or response to the question in the Thread title, I have discovered why Gnome Classic did not display the expected Menu headings, and the Unity 3D Launchers in the left side do not bother me.

So I am going to transfer the question of the error messages to another Thread, and mark this one as Solved. I will edit it later to add a link to the new Thread.

Chao!, bogan.

[trimmer]

Sorry to see you are getting little support bogan. I am about to undergo the upgrade to LTS and have grown accustomed to the Gnome 3 interface. That is what I came here to research before performing the upgrade.

I am very disappointed to see your original post is 4 days old and not one reply has been offered in assistance. So much for LTS.

I will assume since you are receiving no response that the majority of people are not experiencing this issue and I will report back to you once I finish with my upgrade.

[bogan]

Hi!,Trimmer,

I have to admit your response was a little unexpected, I had assumed everyone who might have a clue was too busy to read my long Posts. Even if there were no responses, at least 590 people got to read about some possible problems and cures.

I spoke too soon about no more crash reports: I re-ran

 sudo unity --reset

and it gave the usual long string of errors and hung up, also as before, and a few minutes later I got a :"Sorry, the application 'unity-lens-video' has closed unexpectedly" message, and that was in Gnome Classic, so unity was not even supposed to be running.

As for LTS upgrades, I do not rely on this computer, it is a backup to another, and both have 10.04 LTS on them, as well as 11.10 as the main OS on my No1 Desktop. For that I used a direct install.
This one has been updated to every release since 9.01, so there is no saying what weird things might have got deranged. In 11.10, it behaved quite differently in many respects to the direct install of the same version.

So I would advise you to make a LIveUsb and run that for a few days, at least, before installing, rather than doing an Update Manager update.

Also, use Ubuntu Software Center>Edit>Software Sources>Other Sources>Other and scan to find the best mirror to download from. I was getting 64kB/s from the UK main, and after scanning I got 723kB/sec from a source in Lithuania, and 925kB/s from one in Czechoslovakia!.

Looking forward to hearing how you get on, I will keep an eye on this Thread even though I have marked it as 'Solved'

Chao!, bogan.

[trimmer]

Not too busy.

Upgrade was seamless. No glitches of any kind and all of the desktop environments work for me.

This is probably why nobody is responding.

I experienced errors like what you are experiencing on another machine when I was attempting to upgrade from the 10.04 LTS to the 11.10 Oneiric. I gave up on that machine because it appeared that the errors were caused by mis-matched memory on the main board. I had one bank of ECC ram and one bank of non-ECC and I thought that the ECC would just shut itself off to accommodate the non-ecc ram I had and it did, but that did not stop Ubuntu from seeing the bank of ECC RAM and the lists required for dpkg to operate kept corrupting causing incomplete installations of many different softwares from the repositories.

I did finally get a working machine out of it but because of the corruption of simple things like I just described I scrapped the whole project until I can get some matching RAM for the box. That probably won't happen because the mainboard also had physical evidence of bad(nearly popped) capacitors.

Check the insides of your box to look for evidence of the capacitors corroding. If you see any swelling at all on the top portion of the caps this is probably the same thing I experienced.

I say all this because, truly, the upgrade was totally seamless. Not one error.

KUDOS to the Ubuntu team.

[jlh68]

On my desktop Classic Menu Indicator I cannot get it to display "main menu" in the pull down part of the indicator. I find it on my two other systems.

I want to rearrance some of the menu items into other categories. How do I do that with out the "main menu" function.

[cmcanulty]

I have one laptop that won't run unity at all. It is installed and I can login to it but when I do it still looks exactly like my classic session, 3 panels, no launcher. Other machines do both fine and I have had no help fixing it except to try the unity reset thing which does absolutely nothing. What I would love is classic with the dash and no launcher but not sure that is possible. I wanted to keep trying unity to see if I could get used of it but now that seems impossible. I hope someone answers to help us.

[Buntu Bunny]

This is why I gave up on Unity. It's Xfce for me.