[Solved] Lost Unity

[Colin Law]

On 21 October 2011 21:34, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
> ...
> Turns out I shot myself in the foot. To get unity back I opened a terminal
> and typed ccsm to open the settings manager.  Than I noticed that Ubuntu
> Unity Plugin was NOT checked.  I checked it and Unity  came back.  I
> certainly did not uncheck it on purpose.  I must have dragged the mouse
> pointer across it without realizing what I had done.

I don't think you shot yourself in the foot- I think there is a bug. I
have just had exactly the same experience (though a normal install not
in Virtual Box).  I installed ccsm and had a look at some of the
settings and at some point the panel and launcher disappeared.  I got
similar messages and hanging when I ran unity --reset and then found
your post, ran ccsm from a terminal and discovered as you did that the
unity plugin was disabled.  There is no way that I disabled it myself,
and the fact that the same thing happened to you suggests a bug.

Enabling the plugin brought everything back as it did for you.

...

Having typed the above I went off to see if I could find a bug in
launchpad and found this [1] - Panel and Launcher are lost if 'Set
Default Settings' is pressed in ccsm.  It is possible that I did this.
@Jim is it possible you did this also?  I have added a comment to the
bug that it should be higher priority as I think clicking Set Default
Settings is a natural thing to do after experimenting with settings
and having it make the system effectively unusable is serious.

Colin

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/777024