The Problem Link to heading
A few months back I installed the latest 14.04 Ubuntu updates and suddenly Unity stopped working - no launchpad, no menubars, no nothing…
I did a fair bit of searching the Interwebs and didn’t find that one trick to restore Unity. So I gave up and installed Gnome instead, which ran fine.
However, the problem kept nagging me until tonight, when I finally took the plunge to figure out how to resolve.
Root Cause Link to heading
It turns out that for whatever reason there was no /etc/X11/xorg.conf (some posts suggests that it all automagically reconfigures - didn’t work so well for me). I therefore decided to try and create an xorg.conf.
The following wiki shows that if you run the following as root, it will generate a new xorg.conf: Xorg :0 -configure
The Solution Link to heading
One caveat: beforehand you will need to restart your PC and boot in recovery mode so you do not run X when attempting to run the Xorg configuration; then choose to run a root shell.
Then you will need to remount / as read/write:
mount -o remount,rw /
Now run:
Xorg :0 -configure
Now reboot.
If it’s working, great!
Cleanup (Optional) Link to heading
If you had previously installed Gnome to revive your desktop (like me) then you can remove it (and thereby also restore the unity-greeter so that you’re looking at Gnome login at every reboot) by running:
sudo apt-get remove gnome-session
sudo apt-get autoremove
Originally published at https://jensenmo.blogspot.com/2014/12/restoring-unity-under-ubuntu-1404.html