I did a quite drastic removal of packages from my Ubuntu, and seem to have lost the sidebar / dock in Unity. The desktop icons are still there and work, but there's no way to launch applications from the side-bar or get to the terminal.
What's the name of the program / package so I can reinstall it?
Update : actually it's worse than this. I seem to have lost the ability to tab between different windows, and all the necessary Window maximize / minimize / close buttons in the "chrome" of the browser are gone too. How can I restore these?
Best Answer
You should be able to get a terminal Window by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T or executing "gnome-terminal" in the Alt+F2 HUD.
If those two also disappeared, you have to use the TTY1 full-screen terminal. You get there by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. You get back to the graphical surface (TTY7) with Ctrl+Alt+F7. In the TTY, you have to login first by manually entering your username and password. After that you may run any command you want.
I am not sure which packages you have removed or which packages are needed to get back these basic functionalities, but I would think that reinstalling ubuntu-desktop would be a good start.