one day you wake up... and everything's gone!

[Matt Patterson]

A good place to start to make ubuntu/gnome happy is:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-base
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

That should put back all the basic installation files in case something 
got damaged.

Then I would recommend possibly logging in as a different user (might 
have to login to console and create one). Maybe your profile got damaged 
somehow. I am sure someone else around here can give you the details on 
how to reset the info for your gnome profile.

Good luck,
Matt



Michaël Van Dorpe wrote:

>Hello! I'm e-mailing this from Internet Explorer in Windows XP... yes,
>indeed, I believe something has gone wrong.
>
>I started my computer this morning, with Ubuntu 5.04, gave my username
>and password, the splash screen came up, with the log on sound, and
>then I had a brown background (which is not my standard background), I
>could see the top and the bottom panel, without any applets on them,
>no clock or anything, and also a gdesklet on my desktop loaded just
>fine.
>
>Everything else was not there: icons, notification area, other
>applets, menus, etc... I also cannot get a Alt+F2 window to start
>programs. I cannot right-click the desktop. I can change to my other
>workspace with Ctr-Alt-Right.
>
>Yesterday, I updated the linux-headers, as asked by the update
>notifier. Also, last week or so, I changed to the 686 image and
>removed the previous image. I also started reading
>www.linux-tutorial.info and explored the things on my system that
>tuturalial was talking about, but that was fairly innocent I think. I
>installed some standard packages (not from backport), such as
>ephiphany and gnumeric, and removed some other packages, such as
>gnome-meeting. It's possible that I have rebooted several times since
>I did all this, and thus it may be irrelevant. I also ran folding at home
>for a couple of hours.
>
>Could you please get me in the right direction? I'm quite confident
>that, in the end, everything will be fine again, but if I didn't know
>how active this mailing list is, or even if I didn't have access to
>the internet (thanks to windows xp!), I think I would start panic...
>
>I'm sure I will learn a lot from your answers and from this whole situation :-D
>
>Thanks a lot,
>
>Michaël Van Dorpe
>
>  
>