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I've gone through a ton of threads regarding this issue with nothing working for me. I removed compiz to reinstall it (foolishly) and I just can't seem to get unity back. I'm on 14.04.

The Unity Plugin is checked in Compiz Config Settings Manager.

enter image description here

I've tried uninstalling everything and reinstalling everything.

sudo apt-get remove compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get remove compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get purge compiz*

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get install git compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install unity

One thing that I think my problem might be is that I can't get a connection with dconf.

When I try solutions like this: 

sudo dconf reset -f /org/compiz/
setsid unity

or like this

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool
unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

I get a huge list of errors like

dconf-WARNING**: failed to commit changes to dconf: Could not connect: Connection refused
dconf-WARNING**: failed to commit changes to dconf: Could not connect: Connection refused

Anyone have other suggestions for how I can fix this? I'm desperate not to have to reinstall the operating system altogether.

Thanks in advance.

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2 Answers 2

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3

I had simmilar problems not long ago, this fixed the problem for me:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity

This will force the reinstall without keeping the configuration files, that seem to be the cause of your problem.

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  • 1
    Re-installing ubuntu-desktop has no effect, because that's just a meta-package, and is therefore pointless. Contrarily to what you claim, apt-get install --reinstall doesn't modify any configuration files – especially not those residing in user directories like those of compiz – (unless there's a package update that would overwrite modifications to the system configuration files).
    – David Foerster
    Dec 1, 2014 at 16:43
  • I think that works but in my case I had a compiz profile backed up and did the purge and resinstall then imported the profile
    – userDepth
    Apr 4, 2016 at 10:27
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I have messed up my system like this also. (I uninstalled a default system component and a large number of packages went with it.) I ran: 

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity

System settings is now available again and all system setting applets are back.

With further research I discovered this thread ....

Actually, there are few things in Ubuntu et al. that will allow you to roll-back changes. Briefly below:

  • /var/backups/dpkg.status: this directory keeps a set of log of the last system state prior to an install as follows
  • /var/backups/dpkg.status.0: is the most recent log prior to a state change (e.g. package install/remove/update ...etc)
  • /var/backups/dpkg.status.?.gz: are compressed, archived versions of the logs at various points in time, rotated monthly.
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