Saturday, May 5, 2012

fixing a lost ubuntu unity dash

Gahh... blue screen of death was a blessing.. unix systems really can get themselves in all kinds of crazy twists. I have been trying out that various media center software for ubuntu lately... Its bad worst and just plain ugly.. Mythtv, freevo ... nothing just works nicely they have trouble doing the basic of playing an avi from a hard disk, or booting up with out destroying the monitor settings if the TV is powered down... out of all of it the one that works the best is vlc... surprise surprise.. Im on the vague of setting up a web server hacking some php together that talks to a telnet interfaced vlc deamon that boots up at start up... and calling it a day...

Anyway back to the point.. playing with this stuff tends to brick your box real quick. basically the lot of them are too invasive and over bloated with addtional power features while neglecting the basics... On several of my trials i lost the unity dash and menu-bars here is how i was restoring it.

Punch ctrl+alt+f1 if you cant get a terminal(might be safer to do it here anyway) then run
unity --reset
sudo restart lightdm
Punch ctrl+alt+f7 to jump back to the GUI interface and watch/check the restart..

May take 1 or 2 tries and its a little slow and sometimes get stuck doing the --reset.

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