Unable to boot Ubuntu 10.04lts after uninstalling the gnome panel in error.
 

I had a problem with my mouse acting crazy and thought it was the gnome panel applet, so I uninstalled it. Now I cannot reboot my computer into Ubuntu to reinstall the program. How do I get ubuntu to boot? I am totally at a loss.

you mean it wont reboot or it wont boot to Desktop?

you could try

Hi,
It starts to boot as normal ... going through the usual 'post' and then it stops before the desktop loads ...

I'll give that a try and report back ...

I hope you have a wired internet connection, because by default Ubuntu handles wireless connections with NetworkManager and it won't start if the desktop won't come up. That means if a wireless connection is all you have (I assume this is fairly common, a lot of people I know have wireless routers instead of wires running all around the place), then a problem that breaks some piece of the desktop breaks your internet connection as well. If you didn't install any command line wireless tools such as wpa_supplicant prior to that, you only have two options for internet: either get wired connection or practically give up of your wireless security for a while ('iwconfig' is there, but it can't handle WPA encryption). I think this is a serious problem, but on the other hand not everyone is willing to deal with command line only environment even then...

Anyway, if you happen to end up in a situation like that, and don't want to/can't use non-encrypted/WEP-encrypted (= weak) wireless network nor can you use wired connection (e.g. you cannot physically access any of that hardware), you can always download the necessary files on another computer and then bring them over. Without internet connection you can still run something like

possibly with --dry-run option if you like, to get a list of packages (including dependencies) that would be downloaded/installed in order to install the given package. Then pick up the list and fetch the packages on another computer (manual download from a reposity, or use apt-get with --download-only option on another OS of same version), carry them over on some media and either install them manually by double-clicking or running

or place them at /var/cache/apt/archives, where apt will find them without an internet connection when you run apt-get to do the job.

Apt also keeps log of what's been done (I think it's /var/log/apt/history.log). Check the file to see what exactly was removed when the problem came up, and then just fetch/reinstall those packages for a start.

okay, this is what happened. I need my computer working and couldn't find a definitive answer how to fix it, coupled with the few computer related annoying problems that I had, and after serious consideration of the time involved I wiped my HD. I had spent several hours trying to repair the system, and it took me less than half the time to reinstall the operating system and get back on line and back to work. Okay, I may have lost a few files in the process, but being a good chap I had backed up most of my important stuff to an external drive.

Don't think I wasn't grateful for all the suggestions that I had because I really was. I took this action because I was under pressure from work commitments and I just didn't have the time to wait in the hope that the right solution would be instantly forthcoming.

Thank you all once again.