Ubuntu – Reset Unity and Gnome to default values

11.10gnomeunity

Possible Duplicate:
How do I reset my Unity configuration?
How do I reset GNOME to the defaults?

Apparently I've messed up a lot with my Unity and Gnome 3 settings and now my system
looks ugly, and even if I made changes (using gnome-tweak-tool for example) to my
configuration nothing seems to work.
Can you guys tell me how to delete all the Unity and Gnome related settings (like also compiz and all other similar ones)
and restart with the settings of an installation from scratch??

I'd really appreciate your help,
thanks a lot guys!

Best Answer

This worked for me! I've just reset a broken Unity desktop where my user's theme had turned ugly and the dash and top left tray and system menu had stopped appearing. None of the apps seemed to be broken, it was only the very desktop environment I wanted to reset. I did this by moving these two directories out of the way: ~/.config/compiz and ~/.config/dconf. Before I reached to this conclusion, I had run "unity --reset" and "unity --reset-icons", but as far as I could tell, they didn't influence my setup one bit.

Instructions:

  1. Log out of X. I can't do this, since my logout menu didn't appears.

  2. Find a virtual terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+F1) and login.

  3. Kill X if you can't logout:

    sudo killall Xorg

    X will die, restart, and switch virtual terminal. Switch back with Ctrl+Alt+F1.

  4. Then run:

    mv -v ~/.config/compiz-1 ~/.config/compiz-1.BROKEN
mv -v ~/.config/dconf ~/.config/dconf.BROKEN

  5. Then go back to X (Ctrl+Alt+F7) and login.

You should now have been set back to a working Unity desktop environment, but without resetting any of your application settings. Also, you can restore the directories, if you wish, since they where just renamed and not deleted.

Related Question