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I was working on the system all day on Friday and had it logged out for the weekend. This morning when I try to boot Ubuntu, I'm taken to a screen consisting of the default desktop purple-orange and nothing else. I can right click and use the standard options available, but nothing else. I have tried every possible keyboard shortcut for the terminal (other answers say to run ccsm) but I can't get a terminal to appear.

Is there another way to get the terminal to show up so I can attempt to fix this? Any other workarounds?

user280868
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    Use CTRL + ALT + F1 to open tty1. – Louis Matthijssen May 12 '14 at 15:24
  • and probably use startx in tty? – Venkatesh May 12 '14 at 15:31
  • No keyboard shortcuts seem to work, I haven't been able to get anything to open. Basically all I can do is get the right click menu and everything that comes with that, and get the switch user menu by allowing the desktop to sleep and waking it up again. – user280868 May 12 '14 at 15:33
  • did you try shutting down and restarting manually?(ok this might be silly!) – Venkatesh May 12 '14 at 15:36
  • I've restarted a few times now with no success. Anything I change in the settings menu doesn't seem to actually change either, for example I tried setting the sleep time to a minute rather than the default 5 minutes and it still takes 5 minutes to sleep. None of the windows I can open have the close-minimize-expand bar at the top so anything I open is open for good. – user280868 May 12 '14 at 15:39
  • How did you set the sleep time? Did you get access to the terminal? BTW are you stuck on the login screen or the desktop? And what where you doing before logging out on Friday? – Venkatesh May 12 '14 at 15:44
  • So since I can right-click, I opted to change the desktop background and then from there went into the settings menu. This menu only shows 8 icons instead of the normal ones, but everything seems to let me look at it. I changed the sleep time in the brightness & lock menu. Still no access to the terminal. I'm stuck on the desktop, not the login screen. On Friday I was compiling a few basic software packages to get set up since this is a new install. – user280868 May 12 '14 at 15:45
  • @user280868 "a few basic software packages" ... elaborate about this in your question...it might be useful. – Venkatesh May 12 '14 at 15:56
  • Pidgin, Banshee, VMD. Just to see how I was at compiling from source. – user280868 May 12 '14 at 16:11
  • Hmmm... Let me confess that I am beginning to see myself useless here!!(I have got to lot a learn more it seems!) Anyways I once changed the source of a particular s/w from trusty to saucy since it wasn't available for trusty and when I rebooted...well, everything was haywire and I had to reinstall the OS. Did you try anything like this? – Venkatesh May 12 '14 at 16:14
  • Can you login as a different user? – bain May 12 '14 at 16:58
  • Logging in as guest gives the same issue. – user280868 May 12 '14 at 17:12

1 Answers1

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I had this same issue, and couldn't even get a terminal at tty1. I figured it out, so I came back here to post my solution.

  1. Right click on the desktop, create a folder.
  2. Double-click the folder to load the file explorer.
  3. Navigate to /usr/bin and load terminal (filename is gnome-terminal)
  4. Now run CCSM and enable the Unity plugin. You'll get your stuff back.

Good luck!

sejje
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