Ubuntu 10.04: Can't change the theme...?
 

Hello, guys. I'm a little stumped with a problem in Ubuntu 10.04, maybe someone can help me.

After a few years of Ubuntu 8.04, about a month ago, I upgraded to 10.04. Everything was going nice and easy until this morning's updates. I performed updates normally, rebooted and got a message saying the default settings for GNOME power management hadn't been configured. My desktop reverted to a theme I wasn't using before (I had the Dust theme on) and I had some trouble logging in to the desktop.

I lurked about for someone reporting a similar problem and tried a solution that seemingly worked (purged gnome power management and reinstall, reboot both before and after reinstall). Only now I still can't change my theme.

Accessing Appearance Preferences, the only thing I can actually change is colors. Window borders, pointer, icons and display remain as they were when the error message first came up. Also, I can see a display of file size underneath files and number of items underneath folders... I figured I was in a safe mode of sorts, so I logged out, and back in - same issue.

So either this is really simple and I'm making a fool of myself now, or there's something rotten here. Can someone help me?

from my experience, 10.04 has problems with updating. You may try

sudo apt-get -f install

This will make sure there are no broken packages. Hopefully this will fix your problem.

I just found out I can't access my external drive either...

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded...

Alright, after messing about a little, I think I managed to solve at least part of the problem.

I figured the whole thing was related to the gnome power manager config. As I wrote before, I uninstalled and reinstalled it and the problem persisted.

I lurked about a little more, since a lot of people seem to get stuck with the same problem, and thought to do I did it, restarted, and yay, I can change the color scheme and icons again. But the theme itself and mouse pointer are still not working.

I also get the same bulky icons, the same font, the same sort of display I was getting when stuck with the blue-and-gray theme. My external HD also does not open. I double click it, all icons vanish for a second, then come back, but the drive itself will not open up. I tried moving a file to it by dragging the file directly from desktop to the HD icon, I get the File Operations window, so I assume the HD is working, but not being displayed. The HD also shows up prettily in Disk Utility and it's not full.

On a desperate attempt to solve it, after lurking a while longer, I found two more hints: maybe my disk's full (from what I managed to see, it's not) and running was suggested as well. I'm still stumped.

Anyone else got a similar problem or experienced something like this?