What do these Unity errors mean and why are they showing up?

Question

Unity has just crashed and the following is displayed when I try to restart it by running the command unity:

Initializing bailer options...done
Initializing detection options...done
Initializing composite options...done
Compiz (opengl) - Fatal: No valid GL extensions string found.
Compiz (bailer) - Info: Ensuring a shell for your session
Cannot register the panel shell: there is already one running

This computer has been running Unity for the last few days with no problems, so this is not likely a hardware issue.

What do I have to do to get Unity to restart?

If you don't do much Compiz customizations try resetting Compiz. — Oxwivi, Jun 06 '11 at 07:21
This question should instead be filed as a bug report, thanks! Instructions here. — Marco Ceppi, Feb 01 '12 at 20:23

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 01 '11 at 20:50

1

Try CTRL + ALT + F1

login to TTY1

type

unity --reset &

then CTRL + ALT + F7 to see if Unity was reset successfullly.

answered May 01 '11 at 20:50

fossfreedom

172,746

This did not work. Actually it just ended up restarting gdm... thereby causing me to lose all my open windows. – Nathan Osman May 01 '11 at 20:52
OK, sounds like a Compiz/Unity crash. Does this happen all the time when you login? Does it happen with another user account? Maybe one of the startup applications is causing Compiz/Unity to crash. – fossfreedom May 01 '11 at 20:55
It happened when I ran a D3D app in Wine. See here. – Nathan Osman May 01 '11 at 20:56

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 02 '11 at 22:12

Try starting unity-window-decorator when it crashes the next time. When Natty was still in beta and apport was still enabled, apport told the name of the crashed process (and for me, it was always unity-window-decorator). You can also look in /var/log/syslog, it should have a line with "segfault".

What do these Unity errors mean and why are they showing up?

2 Answers2