My host OS crashed while my Xubuntu VM was updating things. After restarting and loading up the VM, I was greeted with a blank grey desktop and nothing to click on. Luckily, I could still get to a terminal with the keyboard.
With some googling I figured out that I had lost the xfce4-panel and xfdesktop packages, which I reinstalled using apt, getting back my panels and desktop background and icons, respectively.
I've just tried to launch one of my desktop shortcuts, and discovered that they don't work, it seems that I'm also missing thunar. I'm just about to reinstall that, but I'm beginning to wonder what other weird problems I'm going to run into, and how on earth I'll figure out what packages I need to reinstall to fix them.
I've already tried apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, and dpkg --configure -a as per this answer, but they didn't seem to do much. Is there an easy way to figure out what I need to reinstall, or even just to reinstall all the xfce-related things, as that seems to be what's missing?
My virtual machine application supports guest OS snapshots, but I don't have any.
xfce4-packages, which seems like what I needed. If you add that as an answer I'll accept it. – Cam Jackson Oct 18 '14 at 23:36