Ubuntu – How to restore Unity configuration (and other problems) after hard reboot

14.04launcherthemesunitywallpaper

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04. It locked up on me, and I did a hard reboot. (I had to reboot by physically holding down the power button.) What happens now, is my wallpaper, my icons in the Launcher, my theme — it is all gone.

I am also missing stuff in my Launcher that was there, and there are icons there that I didn't have there before (or that I had removed when I started customizing). I am back to the default Unity theme.

But it's more than just a missing theme. As I say, the items I had in my Launcher are missing too. Some of these are a real problem because I installed them through the Software Center, and so I do not know the Terminal command for them. And customizations like auto-hiding the launcher are gone, too. International keyboards that I had installed are gone.

And there is one more piece of weirdness. In the login screen, I have my wallpaper, custom icons, etc. (but not the keyboards). Once I log in, then it there are the problems that I have described.

I am open for any suggestions on how to resolve this.

Here are the contents of some the relevant logs:

$ ls -ld ~/.xsession-errors{,.old} ~/.config
drwx------ 1 grace grace 1064 Dec 28 23:10 /home/grace/.config
-rw------- 1 grace grace  835 Feb  2 15:35 /home/grace/.xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 grace grace  638 Feb  2  2017 /home/grace/.xsession-errors.old

$ more .xsession-errors.old
Script for ibus started at run_im.
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd respawning too fast, stopped

$ ls -lR ~/.config/unity
/home/grace/.config/unity:
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 grace grace 0 Jan 13  2015 first_run.stamp

The file .xsession-errors is empty.

It was suggested to me by another user to include links to more of my log files (in /var/log), in case they are relevant. Here they are:

Best Answer

I suspect that the ~/.config/dconf/user file was corrupted. You can test that theory by renaming the file to e.g. user.old, log out and then log in again, and see if that measure affects the possibilities to change the settings.

If that fails, reboot before trying anything else...

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