What's wrong with my Ubuntu appearance

Question

I don't know what happened but my background become idle. So I want to change the background. Right click on the desktop then click "Change Desktop Background" but nothing happened. So I manually check the appearance setting. I noticed that it's different from the usual one. My Appearance Setting window become the old one.

Mine: Mine

Instead of: Desired

However I can't change the background. It's just black, but when I change it into the purple background (default background) it becomes plain purple.

Can someone help me fix this?

I'm just adding this as a comment because I don't quite understand what you are asking. But that is the new Appearance application. The second link is the theme editor for previous versions of Ubuntu. Looking at the first link it also looks like your window manager has crashed (no window buttons and plain grey theme). Try restarting your computer as well. — benj, Dec 07 '11 at 16:58
1)That's the new Appearance window in Gnome 3 Your gnome-settings-daemon crashed restart it, 2) That's the Old Appearance window in Gnome 2. — Uri Herrera, Dec 07 '11 at 17:20
Yeah, I mean my Appearance window become the old Appearance window. I've restarted my computer but nothing happened. — Thoyib Antarnusa, Dec 07 '11 at 22:50
If you can open a Terminal (ALT + CTRL + T), type 'unity --replace'. Then restart your computer. — J. Austin Rodriguez, Dec 08 '11 at 00:29
You appear to have lost the status bar, per each window. Which Ubuntu version? e.g 11.10 (Oneiric) + Unity-2D — david6, Dec 08 '11 at 01:42
If something ever goes wrong in Ubuntu, first reboot, second remove any software or reset any settings to how it was when it worked. Still having problem? then ask here :) — Alvar, Dec 08 '11 at 08:57
Hi @ThoyibAntarnusa. Have you solve this issue? Please refer to this post. Thanks. — penreturns, Oct 24 '12 at 10:11
I had similar experience with my Chrome and Thunderbird turning grey. It seemed to be caused by the Nvidia proprietary driver. The following link helped me solved my problem: http://askubuntu.com/a/21324 — , Mar 07 '13 at 09:37

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 13 '11 at 19:04

As I can see from your screenshot you use Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu 11.04 is the last version of Ubuntu that is built on top of Gnome 2.x. From Ubuntu 11.10 and so, Ubuntu uses Gnome 3.x (GTK3+) libraries which are way much different from past versions of Ubuntu (GTK2+).

From your screenshot it seem to me that you must have installed a PPA to your system that brings those Gnome 3.x libraries as dependencies. Because this libraries are marked as "upgrade" for your system, they have upgraded some parts of your Ubuntu, like the new appearance settings which is available for the new version (11.10) of Ubuntu.

What you can do is:

Find which PPA caused this and remove it
Refresh your package list
Uninstall gnome-settings-daemon and then install it again

You should now have the old one that is compatible with your system (Ubuntu 11.04)

What's wrong with my Ubuntu appearance

1 Answers1