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I am relatively new to Ubuntu having run 10.04 for just over a year without a single glitch of any magnitude. I decided to upgrade, which was certainly a mistake but am trying to correct for the results of my status as a Linux novice.

I am running a Dell Evo. I attempted to upgrade to 13.10 and the installation hung. I did a little research and found that sometimes a USB keyboard causes a failure. I replaced with a PS2 and the installation went without issue. Restarting the system after install, I found that all personal items were on the desktop and accessible but all the pinned programs, software icons on the left side were absent.

Through a link on my desktop I was able to get to the web and began reading. I discovered what may be my major error. I failed to upgrade step by step through each new version. Because everything I have is cloud backed up, I decided to reinstall a new version alongside the partially operative version but found that I could not close the browser. After exhausting other options, I did a hard restart and installed another version alongside. Starting that installation gave me a totally blank background. The only action possible was a right click that allowed the creation of a new file.

I am now considering either a reformat or a new hard drive and a totally clean install of 13.10. Any thoughts?

user237224
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  • see if this question helps......Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears – TrailRider Jan 18 '14 at 17:30
  • Got ccsm loaded. Attempted to enable unity. Got a message that openGL was required, clicked enable then told the OpenGL required scale. Clicked enable, then a message that expo was required.Terminal dialog opened and when it got to "icons loading it hung and had to reboot. Would just reformatting and going back to 10.04 be easier. This just seems awfully buggy. I have ordered a dvd. Will this help? Also tried to get-and install Open GL with no success. – user237224 Jan 19 '14 at 18:33
  • going back to 10.04 would be risky, it is not longer updated so no security fixes. it would appear that something did not get installed but I have no idea what. having the liveDVD would allow you to reinstall 13.10 and it should install what was missing....reformatting is not necessary, you could just select "something else" confirm(reselect) the partitions and how they are mounted and then make sure the format box is unchecked and it will reinstall with out affecting your files(or if /home is already on it own partition you can just reinstall and it will format / but leave /home alone. – TrailRider Jan 19 '14 at 19:15

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As the duplicate question did not help, lets see if this will help....

First try to reset Unity and Compiz

Go to tty1 (crtl+alt+F1) log in (this can be done from a terminal in the desktop if that will load or recovery mode(with networking))

dconf reset -f /org/compiz/
setsid unity
unity --reset-icons

Source for above code

If resetting does not work:

Before doing a complete reinstall you can try to reinstall Unity it might fix the missing files. 

sudo apt-get clean

to clear all downloaded packages, in case one is corrupted then 

sudo apt-get --reinstall install ubuntu-desktop

to reinstall Unity

If after reinstalling if you still have no desktop try using dconf again and see if this time it will work.

If after all this you still have not desktop, you may need to do a reinstall or get some more competent help....

Community
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TrailRider
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  • Started again with a commercial disk and a write over. Installation went without problem. Startup showed a blank desktop. Rt click brings up a document.folder menu. Tried process above. Got the following – user237224 Jan 25 '14 at 03:45
  • error:error spawning command line idbus-launch-autolaunch = 9f3bb07fbdf3dbdob971c45c52e2ee75--binary-syntax--close-stderr : child process exited with code 1 – user237224 Jan 25 '14 at 03:48
  • usage reset[-f] PATH reset a key or dir. -f is required for dirs arguments pATH either key or dir KEY A key path starting but not ending in '/' Dir a directory path starting and ending with '/' Nothing worked. Tried running from the disk, hung up. working on reinstall now. Not hopeful. – user237224 Jan 25 '14 at 03:53
  • hmmm, I can make no sense of those errors, so I'm of no help there. it's possible that if you have an older computer, it cannot run Unity, but most should be able to(I only mention an older computer as you were using 10.04)...If the reinstall does not work, I would suggest editing your question to include all the step that we(you) tried and the errors above....I would also edit the title to attract some more attention, I would suggest something like, "No Desktop, no Launcher; standard solutions not working." I would also include your computer specs, even the output of lspci could help... – TrailRider Jan 25 '14 at 05:17