When I login, nothing happens.
I am presented with my desktop wallpaper.
No Dash, no Launcher, nothing.
I had the same problem and all the suggestions above failed for me.
I made the following steps:
Installed kubuntu-desktop
as an user interface alternative for Unity (login via ALT + Ctrl + F1, then sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
). Sure, you can choose other Unity alternatives.
Restarted the machine and logged in via KDE.
alice
) with admin rights.alice
).Then, you don't need KDE anymore. ;-)
xfce
(not xubuntu-desktop!!) ? I think it's way less heavy to install (kde is so heavy) and not including *-desktop allows to ditch all "recommended" programs.
May 24, 2014 at 18:45
kubuntu-desktop
because I didn't remember another one. :-)
May 24, 2014 at 19:34
xubuntu-desktop
but even with DE there is only the desktop background after logging in.
Aug 2, 2016 at 19:17
I had recently edited my .bashrc
file with the line guake -r $(hostname)
to automatically rename tabs whenever I opened a new tab in guake
and everything was working perfectly. Then I restarted my computer a few days later and encountered this problem. I can only assume that trying to start guake
without a valid display resulted in some error that completely destroyed something in the unity
pipeline.
So if you've recently modified your ~/.bashrc
try undoing changes.
I just had a black background with a mouse cursor. The following worked for me in addition to enabling the unity plugin again via ccsm, but first I had to do the following because it didn't even properly show the desktop: When doing unity --reset, it stopped at "show session" and some lines before it said "error loading plugin opengl", so i figured this must be related.. and it was! (just be sure to load your specific .so my nvidia installation had a different number of course, just do ls in the folder in described in the link
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/1342339
If the previous answers do not solve the problem, it might be that your HDD is so full that the system cannot work properly, and cannot manage to load the environment.
This can occur quite easily: you let something downloading overnight without a trigger to make it stop if the free disk space goes under a certain limit. At some point the system freezes because all the disk is full. Next morning you try to start it, and it does not load unity.
This, at least is what happened to me. The solution is simple: switch to TTY and delete manually a few things. Then reboot.
If nothing works out so far (from this thread itself, here or with initctl), try the following (tested on Ubuntu16.04):
type in terminal:
$ software-center
then you can install Main Menu (alacarte) in Ubuntu software center
Don't install CompizConfig Setting Manager: it'll hang up your system during reboot , in the best case scenario.
Compizconfig is a dangerous toy now:it can break your Ubuntu installation!!
$ mv ~/.config/dconf/user ~/.config/dconf/user.old