Wallpaper suddenly went black on Ubuntu 13.10

Question

This one is really strange. Two days ago the wallpaper on Ubuntu 13.10 simply went black. I have repeatedly tried to change it in the Appearance menu back to an image, or one of the default wallpapers, but it remains persistently black. I have no clue of what to do. Thanks.

Update I: some things I have tried that did not work:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.background active true
Purging the gnome3 PPA
Setting the wallpaper with Firefox

I have desktop icons, thus I don't think that could be a cause.

Update II: I captured a video of this strange desktop behaviour.

Update III: other fixes that are reported to work on Ubuntu 13.04, but are unsuccessful on Ubuntu 13.10:

Resetting configurations
Unticking the "show desktop icons" option (it doesn't exist in Ubuntu 13.10)
Unticking "Have file manager handle the desktop" in Gnome Tweak Tool
Changing the GTK theme to Adwaita

Update IV: Logging in to a Gnome Flashback session I get the same behaviour with the wallpaper.

possible duplicate of Desktop shows a white or black background instead of wallpapers — guntbert, Dec 03 '13 at 21:02
So far the fixes for 13.04 have proven unsuccessful, please do not close this question. — Luís de Sousa, Dec 04 '13 at 18:44
In the video you posted I never see the wallpaper getting set, let alone suddenly going blank. Also you seem to have a lot of lag while minimizing windows. Are you having your display drivers installed properly(in case you have proprietary graphics cards)? — jobin, Jan 04 '14 at 17:01
The video starts precisely with the wallpaper getting set, with the background remaining black. I do not have any proprietary drivers installed and do not have any display issues. — Luís de Sousa, Jan 04 '14 at 17:08
Actually, running sudo aptitude search desktop, I found out that Cinnamon was installed... — Luís de Sousa, Jan 08 '14 at 20:27

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 12 '14 at 19:53

1

Make sure Nemo is set to 'NOT handle the desktop'.

Run this command: gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons false

edited Mar 12 '14 at 19:53

v2r

9,547

answered Mar 12 '14 at 18:59

Picard

11
1

Welcome to AskUbuntu. You can see in the answer below a symbol with a green tick, this means the answer has been accepted as a solution to the question. Please take a site tour for more details. – Luís de Sousa Mar 12 '14 at 19:31
There can be multiple answers, what's the problem? – nafg Nov 11 '14 at 01:13

Artemis · Answer 2 · 2014-01-04T17:02:53.533

0

     gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.background active true

and

     sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak-tool

try this hope will work

edited Jan 04 '14 at 17:02

answered Jan 04 '14 at 16:57

Artemis

797
1
6
9

I already tried the first solution (please read the question). The package you suggest is not available from the official repos for 13.10, would you suggest a PPA? What am I then supposed to do with that tool? – Luís de Sousa Jan 04 '14 at 17:12
kindly update your machine first – Artemis Jan 04 '14 at 18:50
Artemis, how will an update register a PPA? – Luís de Sousa Jan 04 '14 at 19:03
Ok, so I found the tualatrix PPA and installed the tool from there. This tool has a menu called Love Wallpaper HD that allows the selection of a wallpaper from the web. If you are referring to this, it has no impact on my desktop wallpaper. – Luís de Sousa Jan 04 '14 at 19:28
Actually this helped me escape the black desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 – Alexandru Furculita May 28 '16 at 06:19

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

Following the hint by kenn, I verified that my problems are caused by Cinnamon. I never installed it myself, but I use Nemo. The package catalogue does not list any Cinnamon packages as dependencies for Nemo, but somehow it got fully installed. The solution to bring the wallpaper back to functioning order is thus:

sudo apt-get remove cinnamon*
sudo apt-get autoremove

And afterwards log out and log back in.

Weird thing is: this actually removed Nemo and now I don't have a graphical file manager.

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 01 '14 at 19:34

0

I have the same problem as you with the black desktop. I'm running unity on ubuntu 13.10 with cinnamon and nemo installed. I've found that if I log out of unity to the login screen the desktop background appears. I wait about 15 secs and then log back into unity and then the desktop background works as normal.

Obviously this is not the ideal solution but it does work for me anyway, hope it works for you!

edited Mar 01 '14 at 19:34

guntbert

13,134

answered Mar 01 '14 at 19:17

Derek

1
1

I can confirm the above answer from Picard (setting gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons false) worked for me. I also set:-
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.background active true

The Unity desktop background now works as normal and I can still use nemo.
– Derek Mar 16 '14 at 22:59

Wallpaper suddenly went black on Ubuntu 13.10

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