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I have been running Ubuntu 14.04 for some while with no problems. I've not knowingly changed anything, but all of a sudden none of the icons in system settings are showing. When I load system settings, the system settings window appears, and the "All Settings" button shows in the top left corner of the window...but nothing else - no icons at all. Any ideas?

Update: I tried to run gnome-control-center from a terminal window. I got the same window appear with no icons, but the following error message appears on the terminal:

** (unity-control-center:25620): WARNING **: Could not load control center menu: Failed to look up menu_file for "/etc/xdg/menus/unitycc.menu"

Looking in the above directory, I have only one file: gnomecc.menu, but no unitycc.menu

I tried to create one by doing "sudo ln -s gnomecc.menu unitycc.menu"

Now, I get a window with some icons but not all that should be there. I just get icons for: Language Support; Security & Privacy; Printers; Firewall Configuration; Landscape Service; and Software & Updates. Normally there are a lot more than that.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Matt Caswell
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  • Does the system settings window appear as usual when using a different (e.g. guest) account? (If for whatever reason a config file in your home directory got somehow messed up other accounts should not be affected.) – Kai Sep 27 '14 at 20:18
  • No, it is the same for other users – Matt Caswell Sep 27 '14 at 20:38

2 Answers2

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Try this:

Open command line (Ctrl+Alt+T) and enter this command:

  1. sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-control-center
  2. It will prompt you for password, enter your password.
  3. Once it's done, check if the system settings has been properly installed and whether the stuff is back. Reboot if necessary.
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
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I have managed to get this working again...although I cannot explain why "sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity-control-center" suggested by David Foerster did not work. My solution is less than satisfactory...but it does now work.

I downloaded the .deb for unity-control-center from launchpad and then extracted the deb into a directory:

dpkg -x unity-control-center_14.04.3+14.04.20140922-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb ucc

And finally picked out the unitycc.menu file and copied into the correct location:

cd ucc/etx/xdg/menus
sudo cp unitycc.menu /etc/xdg/menus

Suddenly everything works again :-)

Many thanks for all the suggestions...it started me down the right track to working out a solution

Matt Caswell
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  • So the original package that supposed to come with installation of Ubuntu didn't have menus file? Could this be the case? – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Sep 29 '14 at 20:25
  • Possibly, although I doubt it - because it used to work just fine. It suddenly stopped for no apparent reason (corrupt file maybe?). What I don't understand is why it refused to reinstall it – Matt Caswell Sep 29 '14 at 21:32
  • Maybe something got messed up with a recent update. Remember I mentioned trying with another kernel? – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Sep 29 '14 at 21:34