Terminal won't launch after upgrading

Question

After upgrading my laptop from 14.10 to 15.04, the terminal wont' launch. Ctrl+Alt+T does nothing. neither will terminal run from dash. I tried launching gnome-terminal from xterm, but nothing happens. Running htop from xterm shows many instances of gnome-terminal. Any advice anyone?

Answer 1

I have read a lot of advice about missing terminals, and it was frustrating when people gave me all these commands, which I cannot enter without my terminal...

Another frustration was not knowing that the terminal is properly called gnome-terminal in Ubuntu.

So to open a console, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and you can log in to a text-only session.

Then try this command which will try to analyze and fix dependencies:

sudo apt-get build-dep gnome-terminal

With my present problem, it first asked me to put some source repos into my repository list. When I fixed that and repeated the build-dep command, it pointed out some 60 unresolved dependencies and offered to fix them, which I accepted.

For getting out of the console and back into your graphical environment, use Ctrl+Alt+F7.

There I found a message telling me to restart the computer which I did.

Either you will now have a working terminal or you might be several steps closer to a solution or at least you have received more information about your system and potential problem.

---

In my case I needed two more things:

I tried launching gnome-terminal from my console with this command:

/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

But I kept getting an error about not being able to connect to Mir (which supposedly is the name of a display server for Linux, being developed for Ubuntu, as a replacement for X11.

So first I entered this into my console:

export DISPLAY=:0

and again:

/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

When I returned to the GUI using Ctrl+Alt+F7, I found a running terminal!

I will still not launch directly from the GUI by clicking, but at least I know that all needed elements are now installed and I can do more research.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

I had the same issue upgrading to 15.04. I also went from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Just changing /etc/default/locale did not fix the issue.

Opening Language Support (in System Settings) and trying to change the default language gave the error that internationalisation was not fully installed. Clicking OK to install it gave an error.

The issue was that the boot partition (/boot) was full, blocking the download of the required packages. Search "cleaning the boot partition" for details - note that dpkg will not list all kernels from previous (32bit) versions so use the options to list what is installed in /boot.

After cleaning the boot partition, go into Language Support, change the default language, and accept the updates. That fixed the issue for me.

Answer 3

Language support and internationalisation was not fully installed, was my problem, too. After running the installation, Terminal started running normally! I had no problem with "/boot" or anything else.

Answer 4

OPs answer

Problem was a custom locale. Now using standard en_US.utf8 and gnome-terminal works normally.

Answer 5

I guess this is how you fix this.

You can change the locale in /etc/default/locale. You can try setting the contents of that file to:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US"

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