cannot interact with gnome

Question

I am running Linux 14.04 with Gnome. My Laptop just spontaneously lost all ability to interact with gnome - no toolbar at the top, no icons on the left, work space switching does not work, and no keyboard shortcuts work, except for the only custom keyboard shortcut I have for gnome-system-monitor. However, the mouse and keyboard still work, and I can interact and open a text file that I happen to have on my desktop.

I had a terminal open, and restarted via it, but when my laptop restarted, it did not start up again. Subsequent restarts (via the power button) did nothing.

As I said, I am able to get the system monitor working, and here are some notable processes:
-My ram usage is much lower than usual after restarting -compiz, nautilus and gnome-session are running

The Only interaction that works, apart from being able to open the system monitor, is Ctrl-Alt-F1.

Update
My Fix is in the answers

Possible duplicate of warning message at command line sudo — heemayl, Feb 06 '15 at 12:46
nope. See my update above. It seems that my gnome-shell was spontaniously uninstalled. — Roman, Feb 06 '15 at 12:50
Please post how did you fix it as as answer so that others can be aware that the issue has been resolved. — heemayl, Feb 06 '15 at 12:53
Ok, solution is posted as an answer. Hope it helps someone who lands in the same weird boat. — Roman, Feb 06 '15 at 13:25

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

As per request in the comments, here are what I think are the relevant steps to solving the issue:

Since Ctrl-Alt-F1 is the only thing that works, do that. You might be able to open a terminal via a shortcut or something, but I recommend doing all fixing there.

1) Try restarting gnome shell with gnome-shell -r
2) if gnome-shell is not installed, sudo apt-get install gnome-shell.
3) during the instillation, it will ask you if you want gdm or lightdm. (links show images of what the Display Manager looks like)
4) According to this article, DISPLAY=:0 gnome-shell --replace. I believe only 0 works, since I tried 6 and 7 first instead of 0.
5) Reboot, and if that's not fixed yet, restart with gnome-shell -r, and try step 4 again. reboot again.

That is what fixed my laptop, though I have no idea what the cause was in the first place. I also think that all custom settings like workspaces setup gets lost, I like to use compiz, as described in one of these answers.
And here is the guide on how to switch between gdm and lightdm

Note: lightdm does not seem to work on my machine, even thought the process is running, my gnome shell is not there

cannot interact with gnome

1 Answers1