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Okay, so I've just updated to Ubuntu 12.10. I then restarted the laptop and signed in to see a blank desktop.

I have no side launcher or title bar. I have been to the settings and I'm not sure if I can do anything there. I tried; noting worked. I have no desktop shortcuts at all (I didn't before).

I need some help here as the launcher is quite important.

Please help, Thanks,


p.s. I went a very back door route to get onto the internet.

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Do you have proprietary nvidia drivers installed? If so, try this: askubuntu.com/questions/202574/… –  rft183 Oct 19 '12 at 15:06

2 Answers 2

This happened to me as well, after I thought I was installing the correct Nvidia driver. Unless you want to do a whole re-install (like I did twice until I figured it out), you need to do this. Right click your blank desktop, create a new folder. Open folder then navigate to filesystem<--sidbar /usr/bin. From there just right click any of the exec files and "open with other application". Find the ubuntu software center. Of course this is going to error out, but we just need to get that open. Search for "additional driver" install it, open it. Here is where we download and "activate"<-- the correct nvidia driver. I hope you have an Nvidia graphics card, otherwise I have written all this for not.

I also had to use a lot of terminal to figure this out, but what I have for you is the easy 123 version. Good luck, I know exactly how you feel. 4 hours deep!

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Welcome to AU and thanks for your answer. Can you improve readability by formatting paragraphs, code sections etc. ? –  Mateng Nov 15 '12 at 3:59

open terminal and issue below mentioned command. I did this for myself in 14.04 and I got my desktop back.

rm ~/.gconf ~/.gconfd ~/.metacity ~/.compiz-1 ~/.config/compiz-1 ~/.config/dconf -rf
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