gnome-panel disappears after Ubuntu update

Posted on Saturday, 26 July 2008 by atentia

Finally fixed that issue today. A major pain as after an update (as usual the update manager gives a hint for new updates which I as usual followed) all my panels disappeared and I therefore could not acess any programs nor knew what to do.

I luckily had another Window Manager installed as well (XFCE4) so I could at least start my browser and look for help. Did not find a hint for a while, but today the right Bug report appeared. Here is what I did to make it work again:

  1. open terminal session.
  2. login as usual
  3. killall gnome-panel
  4. sudo apt-get install gnome-panel
  5. gnome-panel

That opened up some errors as you can see in the screenshot. Selected delete for all the conflicting plugins and voila. It works again. Have to say, this is bad mistake by the Ubuntu team as it leaves a lot of users with an useless OS.

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5 Responses

  1. Binh, on August 1st, 2008 at 10:24 Said:

    I tried the workaround but rebooting the box seemed to bring the problem back. Had to manually execute ‘gnome-panel’ everytime after reboot. Did you encounter the same behavior?

    Thanks,
    Binh

    Reply
  2. atentia, on August 2nd, 2008 at 11:18 Said:

    No, worked for me out of the box and without starting it manually after reboot. Try installing it again, if that does not help bind it to the startup demons on a higher level (6 I suggest).

    Reply
  3. neowulf33, on October 7th, 2008 at 4:33 Said:

    even just restarting gdm seems to work by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace.. but only sometimes!

    Reply
  4. Ruben.es, on August 5th, 2009 at 8:49 Said:

    Ubuntu with gnome.

    I had similar problem.

    The day before I installed new packages and today after booting up I could see only the wallpaper and some applications that are opened every time.

    Alt+F2 combination didn’t work.
    No panels anywhere.
    Alt+Tab combination works.

    Doing what you can see above you get default panel back but I wanted my custom panels.

    Of course you need a backup so here is my bit.

    # Recover panels from backup.
    cp -R /backupdrive/path/to/your/user/.gconf/apps/panel ~/.gconf/apps/
    # Restart (it will come back by itself)
    killall gnome-panel

    Now everything is back! Hope it helps someone.

    Reply

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