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I was running the distribution upgrade on my System76 Serval Professional, and the upgrade failed while configuring samba.

This installed some of the OS, but even though I can log in (graphically) to the system, panel icons do not work, nor does not Nautilus; Metacity is just gone. How would I reinstall from a live CD over top of the current installation so that all pre-installed applications are installed?

If I can't do this, should I just 7zip my home folder and reinstall applications manually (that is, if the 7zip binary will even work; running the command firefox results in an error- I'm not sure what; maybe my path isn't configured?).

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Try running:

sudo apt-get upgrade

If it says "dpkg was interrupted you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a'" then do what is says: run

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Hopefully that will help.

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This is extremely vague, but I can only say that it didn't work. Apt-get upgrade (and dist-upgrade) returned nothing out if the ordinary, and dpkg configure all didn't return anything, metacity is still gone, binaries simply do not work (I get this for firefox, nautilus, chromium browser, et al. (Firefox in the case of this example): /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/firefox: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x 86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_datalist_get_data – tmcopeland Oct 18 '11 at 0:25
Something tells me this single error is why the window manager doesn't show, Nautilus (file manager and desktop) doesn't launch, and is behind much of the broken state of the operating system. – tmcopeland Oct 18 '11 at 0:36
At this point I really don't know what to do. I would just reinstall the system. – Roman Oct 18 '11 at 0:57
up vote 0 down vote

If you are using a national mirror, try to switch to the Main server. I had missing packages in my default repository.

See: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu#Download_Server

Then run 

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

and see if there are new packages to be installed.

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