Ubuntu 12.10 Crashing Compiz/Unity (not Nvidia related)

Question

I've upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 and compiz and/or unity are constantly crashing rendering my computer useless (no top bar, no dash, no window decorations). I have just discovered that when I login with the guest account everything seems to be working OK.

I've been through all the threads I could find and haven't found a resolution. This isn't Nvidia related (I am running on a System76 laptop with ATI Radeon).

Is there any way I can go about isolating the problem and restore my user account?

Solution

Try typing unity --reset in a terminal.

I discovered that this command doesn't work any longer but there's another way to reset Unity.

First of all install dconf-tools: sudo apt-get install dconf-tools Then to reset Unity and Compiz:

dconf reset -f /org/compiz/

followed by

setsid unity

Hope this helps.

Comments

[Jorge Castro]

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! This question should instead be filed as a bug report, and as such is off-topic, thanks! Instructions on filing a bug report are here.

[Fred Garbutt]

Typing unity --reset in a terminal yields ERROR: the reset option is now deprecated

[thorstorm]

CTRL + ALT + F1. CTRL + ALT + F7 to return to graphical mode.