Unbunt unity help?

Hey guys,

Ok so right off the bad i will say that i am new to unbunt,

 

Now the problem i think i fudged up unity on my unbunt(just got it today)

So the problem its not showing any of the menu interface, i can log in just fine the background appears and the icons on the desktop but nothing else, no menu or anything.

 

Anyone have any idea?

 

Basically i've just installed another desktop interface ( Gnome) and im basically just trying to find a way to make unity work again.

I am currently about re-downloading a copy of ubunt and am about to just re-install it on my laptop but don't really want to just because well. no one wants to lose right? 

 

So if anyone has any ideas what i can do i'd be happy to get your opinion on this matter . 

Why would you reinstall just for Unity.

Go to the software center, uninstall Unity, reboot, reinstall it from the software center again, or faster:

sudo apt-get remove unity

reboot

sudo apt-get install unity

 

Make sure you're running 12.04 LTS if this is your first experience with Ubuntu, it will prevent a lot of potential problems with development releases. 12.04 LTS is now on it's 4th "service pack", and is pretty fast and stable now, you shouldn't have problems with it, in fact; I'm kinda surprised that Unity didn't install properly.

 

If the problem persists after reinstalling Unity, the problem is not Unity, but the compositor. If you're on 12.04, that's Compiz. Disable compiz and if the problem disappears, you'll know whether that is the problem. If it is, disable compiz, uninstall compiz, uninstall unity, reboot, install unity (compiz is a dependency, it will also be installed), and install the unity version of the gnome tweak tool, I think it's called MyUnity these days, but an experienced Ubuntu user on the forum will probably kindly confirm or correct this. That will give you a bit more flexibility to make stuff work if the problem is that your system is not 100% compatible with the compositor, as you'll be able to enable and disable particular functions of the compositor or switch the subsystem the compositor uses (e.g. OpenGL 2/3 or rendering).

Sounds like you are on 12.04 and you used the menu to install your GPU drivers. It dosen't work, you have to install the driver via terminal. 

Gnome works apparently, it also uses composition and GLX. Wouldn't Gnome fail also if the driver would not install? Just trying to think with you, I'm not an Ubuntu specialist.

Im actually on the new one 13.04? and no go on the uninstalling and re-installing unity 

try deleting your .local/share and .config and any .xx file that makes sense to delete, these are usually your configuration files, you might want to leave out .firefox and the chrome ones, and basically any program where you don't want to lose saved data. To access them from nautilus press Ctrl+H to display hidden files, don't go trigger happy on them and check the .config and .local for files you might still need, maybe just cut and paste them in a backup folder instead of deleting them.

Doing this will reset your config to default, meaning if reinstalling unity didn't work it might be a local config setup which would be fixed by this issue, if that doesn't work install a temporary non GNOME based desktop like XFCE or KDE (Unity is basically a replacement of GNOME shell with gnome-panel) and then completely uninstall GNOME and Unity, then install Unity this will garantee any dependency issue to go away, make sure you don't have a GNOME repository enabled.

Also the new one is 13.10, 12.04 is long term support release, meaning it's very stable especially if you have hardware from the past year, The number on the ubuntu versioning is the year.month meaning 13.10 was released in october 2013, ubuntu releases a new version every 6 months meaning next version will be 14.04 and a LTS every 2 years, meaning 14.04 is an LTS

It a lot of times is Jokey (Ubuntus Driver install too) screwing up and compiz (but not GTK) freaking out. A lot of time is that it dosen't fully disable the old driver when you when you install the new one. So you will have to remove your current driver and replace it with the old one and then re install the driver you want.

 

This is Why I don't use Ubuntu anymore