I just upgraded from 12.04 LTS. The upgrade went fine until the moment, while still installing packages, all the unity taskbars and window frames went away. I could do nothing more but observe the installation progress (the only app I had running was Chrome but it hanged, and because of lack of taskbars I couldn't restart it). But installation finished successfully and it asked for reboot. After rebooting, it booted into some low-res mode, displayed a message box that it can't detect my video drivers correctly and apparently I couldn't do anything - there were no reaction to mouse nor keyboard. Oh.
However, I noticed in the logs that while booting, it started that bumblebee optimus thing. I had optimus disabled, so I went to bios and enabled it. I also managed to get into text console (framebuffer) and changed grub settings to boot straight into text mode. Now I tried starting X server manually (startx) and it showed me the high-res desktop, started two apps that I had in autostart, mouse and keyboard were fine. But no taskbars and no window frames. The screen resolution was fine (1920x1080) and looked like nvidia drivers booted properly.
The next thing I tried was uninstalling nvidia-current-updates, uninstalling bumblebee-nvidia, and setting xorg.conf driver to vesa and then nouveau. In both cases, I got low-res desktop with no damn taskbars nor frames. So then I installed only nvidia-current-updates (installation went fine) - I got back nvidia drivers working (logs and splash screen confirmed it), high-res desktop, but of course still with no unity taskbars.
The last thing I tried was removing .compiz and .config/compiz directories from my home folder, as I read such advice on the Internet. Didn't work. Also creating a fresh user account and starting x from there - showed only empty desktop, no taskbars.
Now I'm stuck. Seems the damn thing doesn't work at all. I have to get it somehow working by Monday. Please help me what can I do to:
- fix it
- debug it and fix it
- workaround it, at least so I can make some work while still trying to fix it later - I was thinking of installing a different graphic shell, but I don't know which are usable with ubuntu
- downgrade to ubuntu 12.04 (but really don't want to do that)
My hardware: Dell Precision m4600 i7 Core Quad, 24 GB RAM nVidia quadro 1000M
Ubuntu installed kernel 3.5.0-17.
Thanks a lot, Piotr