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After logging in to my account, I see no panels or anything else, only the background. I cannot even start a terminal with ctrl+alt+t. The only thing the system responds to is ctrl+alt+delete which shows the system monitor (without the top panel) or ctrl+alt+F1 to login by hand. However logging in to the guest session works fine.

When logging in by hand I cannot restart unity (unity --replace), this gives me:

unknown job: unity-panel-service

Without the graphics display open I cannot reset compiz and unity to default settings. Searching other questions I tried to move the .Xauthority in ~/ to some other place. Did not work. I also tried the sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop and sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity +rebooting. Also tried to reinstall lightdm. Nothing works.

I've been running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS just fine for quite some time and haven't recently done any changes besides installing updates.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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So I finally managed to recover by doing the following

mv ~/.config/dconf/user ~/.config/dconf/user.old

This makes me loose all my settings, but at least I can log in and now I can attempt at recovering at least some of the settings from the user.old file.

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    The solution is so simple, yet so strange :) Exactly what I was looking for, although I tried 50 other things
    – Vladimir
    Nov 13, 2014 at 15:11
  • Unfortunately this file is a binary file, so there's no way to restore single values from it. However, it brought me back the desktop after deleting it.
    – David
    Feb 9, 2016 at 10:44
  • I thought I have to reinstall ubuntu again.. huge thanks
    – Shih-Min Lee
    Mar 23, 2017 at 3:15

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