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How do I get Unity back? Installed Gnome 3 on 11.04.

Asked by jgkellt001

Rightly or wrongly I installed Gnome 3, thinking that I'd be able to switch between it, Unity and Gnome 2, and therefore make a personal decision as to which I preferred. Unfortunately I can no longer access Unity although the package is installed.(3.8.12-0ubuntu1 (unity))

I had to install lxde in order to get Gnome 3 to work.

 How do I get unity back?

Although Gnome 3 looks OK I'd rather be able to give Unity a go, than be trapped into Gnome not by choice.

Any help would be good.

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Revision history for this message
Steven Richards (steven.richards) said : 		#1

Open a terminal and do 'unity --reset' that might fix it.

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jgkellt001 (johnkelly01) said : 		#2

That's not a fix!

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jgkellt001 (johnkelly01) said : 		#3

I have un-installed unity completely and then reinstalled, but to no avail. I presume that I should remove Gnome 3, but the question there is, can I then log back in under Unity.

I'm sure someone else must have come across this problem?

Look forward to hearing from some one!

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jay (jadon) said : 		#4

trust me unity is utter grarbage you will hate it

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Michael Sharman (msharman) said : 		#5

Yes I did exactly the same. I managed to recover unity by uninstalling any Gnome 3 packages and reinstalling Unity. Be careful it's easy to get things into a state of partly working because some packages are still using the Gnome 3 version resulting in subtle breakage. Perhaps it would be better to reinstall fresh.

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jgkellt001 (johnkelly01) said : 		#6

I've solved the problem now. I took a deep breath and completely purged Gnome 3 by doing the following in terminal:

sudo apt-get remove libgtk-3-common
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

The desktop now works with Unity and Gnome 2

Thanks to the positive people who have assisted in solving this problem. All I want like most Linux users, is the freedom of choice. If unity doesn't agree with me, I'll simply have another go at Gnome 3, which I now understand. or revert back to Gnome 2. Unity doesn't look that bad and in some ways looks a bit more user friendly than Gnome 3.