Ubuntu – Unity crashes after parallels tools installation (Ubuntu 16.04)

16.04compizparallelsunityxorg

I've downloaded and installed Ubuntu 16.04 throught Parallels 11 on my MacBook Pro.

The installation went fine and after reboot I could login and use the graphical interface without problems.

Anyway, the resolution was low and the display aspect ratio wrong, so I installed Parallels Tools as usual to fix these minor issues and activate some of parallels features.

After I installed parallels tools I rebooted my virtual machine and all seemed to be fine (login and unity worked flawless), but after I restarted again unity keeps crashing every time I do the login.

I'm aware this problem (or similar) has already been solved somehow here:

  1. Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears
  2. Parallels (Tools) 9 & 14.04
  3. Unity is broken after Parallels Tools installation in Ubuntu 14.04

but none of these methods worked in my case.

In particular:

  1. Following the accepted solution in 1 did not work since when I launch ccsm from command line it doesn't appear inside graphical interface.
  2. Reading the only answer in 2 I realised that I had no xorg.conf at all (seems the default behaviour now a days), so I tried sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop and then X -configure and then I reinstalled Parallels Tools with no luck! (NOTE: I had to launch these commands on a clean install since lightdm did not stop properly after I installed Parallels Tools for the first time).
  3. Using suggested solution in 3 (even after generating xorg.conf as described above) I get an error using gsettings reset org.compiz.core:/org/compiz/profiles/unity/plugins/core/ active-plugins saying that DBUS could not connect.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

QUICK AND DIRTY WORK AROUND

Disclaimer: I've found this "solution" by trials and errors, therefore I can't guarantee it's safe. Use it at your own risk.

Background: when Parallels Tools is installed it copies under /usr/lib/compiz/ a bunch of files with this pattern libprlcompiz_*_*_*_*.so (with digits instead of *). Those are unity plugins and, as it seems, when unity gets loaded the latest version of this plugin is loaded as well.

Now, in my case it happens that unity tries to load libprlcompiz_0_9_12_2.so, which causes the error: Segmentation fault (core dumped).

So my catch was to rename this file and hope that the previous plugin version has no bugs (namely libprlcompiz_0_9_12_1.so). Open a terminal and:

sudo mv /usr/lib/compiz/libprlcompiz_0_9_12_2.so /usr/lib/compiz/libprlcompiz_0_9_12_2.so.backup
reboot

Now everything should work fine after login.

I still have three parallels related processes appearing in unity side bar after login (with a question mark as icon), which disappear after a while.

Let me know if this works for you.

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