Linux upgrade horked my menus

schnitzi · 11-07-2009, 12:39 AM

Hi all, I just tried to do the major upgrade to whatever the new Linux version is (9.something) and towards the end of the installation it complained about not having languages installed for menus, or something. I guess I didn't think this was that big of an issue, so I closed the prompt without acting on it. This left me with none of the main desktop menus - just a big gray area where they used to be, even after rebooting. No quick launch menus either, so I can't even launch a terminal window. Help! How can I fix this?

jstephens84 · 11-07-2009, 02:14 AM

What distribution are you using? What desktop manager are you using? we need more information to help you out?

schnitzi · 11-07-2009, 02:34 AM

My apologies - I'm still something of a noob at this - I'm pretty sure it's a standard gnome desktop. Unfortunately because of the problems I can't get at the information as I normally would via the menus.

I can get at a command prompt via alt-ctrl-F1 - is there a command I can run there to determine my exact distro and desktop manager?

jstephens84 · 11-07-2009, 02:38 AM

if you just made this post from it then it is safe to say that it is gnome running on ubuntu desktop. you can also from a terminal look under /etc and you should be able to do the following

Code:

cat /etc/lsb-release

this should give the information about your machine.

jstephens84 · 11-07-2009, 02:43 AM

forgot to add. while in the command prompt make a backup folder under your profile.

move the following to the backup and rename each with a trailing _bkup

.gconf .gconfd .gnome2_private .gnome2

may want to actually log in as root to do this so that you may not have any open files under these directories. then try logging on as your user and see if that defaults your gnome back to original settings.

schnitzi · 11-07-2009, 10:52 PM

That's fixed it! Thanks for your help.

I guess the problem was in one of those files. Luckily I didn't have them so customized that I can't recover fairly quickly. Thanks again...