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My desktop has multiple gray rectangular boxes 32 to be exact on the left side of it running up on it from top to bottom, that won't disappear even when I click into Firefox. They remain on the page of the Firefox unless I open a video to full screen. These boxes appeared so I shutdown my Ubuntu 16.04 GNU/LINUX and restarted it and the tool bar then was missing.

I have to go through the terminal to access the internet. My husband and I tried at least a dozen sudo commands to get that tool bar back and the gray rectangles gone, but nothing worked, all we did was a lot of program running and reconfiguring rebooting etc. My restart process is completely different, it takes longer to load to my desk top and it's not the nice intro any more, just a lot of words and options and countdowns in black and white writing before I get to the desk top.

I then switched user to guest and everything was back to normal. The rectangles disappeared and my tool bar icons and internet globe reappeared. What a relief.

I can only access this through guest how do I fix it in my username and password user?

Takkat
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Dess
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  • Reinstalling will be much faster and easier. Don't do "sudo commands" you don't know what they're for. It seems it all started with a simple drivers issues, either missing or improper. –  Jul 16 '17 at 03:45

1 Answers1

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As you said you do have a wonderfully configured Ubuntu in your guest account. This means that all your issues come from broken settings in your main account.

If Ubuntu runs as a virtual machine in Virtual Box create a snapshot before you proceed to be able to revert to the present state in case something went wrong.

To get a functioning administrator user back simply create a new user:

sudo adduser <name> --ingroup sudo

You will immediately be asked for a new UNIX password (nothing will be displayed while typing) and other data.

Log into the new account to see whether everything is to your liking.

This new user will have a name different to your previous account but you can use this new administrator account for clean up that follows below.

The safe way:

From another administrator account (see above) delete your broken user account (assuming dess was the name)

sudo deluser dess

This will keep the home directory. Then rename the HOME directory to keep all the data we still need.

sudo mv /home/dess /home/dess.old

Now we can re-create our administrator dess

sudo adduser dess --ingroup sudo

Log in to your new account and hopefully be happy with it. All your data are still in the /home/dess.old directory waiting for you to copy them over to your new account. If all is back you can safely delete the old directory to free space.

The fast and courageous way

As it were only settings that broke your account you may just delete them but keep your data in your HOME directory.

From a TTY terminal of another account delete all hidden dot files and directories (choose ls -a to see them):

ls /home/dess -a  ## just to make extra sure this is the right directory ##
sudo rm -Rf /home/dess/.*  ## !!! please no extra blanks or typos here !!! ##

The last command is potentially dangerous as it can recursively and irreversibly delete all and everything (which would not be such a good idea on any other path).

Log in to your account to find everything working and the system magically re-create the dot files for your settings (now with better values). If anything went wrong you can just restore from your snapshot.

The desirable way

In the best case we would remember which settings we had changed and only deleted those setting files affected. But from what I read in your questions this may be too late at this point.

Community
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Takkat
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