How to get back unity and compiz after uninstalling, no launcher or dash on startup

Question

I've gone through a ton of threads regarding this issue with nothing working for me. I removed compiz to reinstall it (foolishly) and I just can't seem to get unity back. I'm on 14.04.

The Unity Plugin is checked in Compiz Config Settings Manager.

I've tried uninstalling everything and reinstalling everything.

sudo apt-get remove compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get remove compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get purge compiz*

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get install git compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install unity

One thing that I think my problem might be is that I can't get a connection with dconf.

When I try solutions like this:

sudo dconf reset -f /org/compiz/
setsid unity

or like this

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool
unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

I get a huge list of errors like

dconf-WARNING**: failed to commit changes to dconf: Could not connect: Connection refused
dconf-WARNING**: failed to commit changes to dconf: Could not connect: Connection refused

Anyone have other suggestions for how I can fix this? I'm desperate not to have to reinstall the operating system altogether.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

I had simmilar problems not long ago, this fixed the problem for me:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity

This will force the reinstall without keeping the configuration files, that seem to be the cause of your problem.

Comments

[David Foerster]

Re-installing ubuntu-desktop has no effect, because that's just a meta-package, and is therefore pointless. Contrarily to what you claim, apt-get install --reinstall doesn't modify any configuration files – especially not those residing in user directories like those of compiz – (unless there's a package update that would overwrite modifications to the system configuration files).

[userDepth]

I think that works but in my case I had a compiz profile backed up and did the purge and resinstall then imported the profile