Unity not Working 14.04
I tried from a backup snapshot of my system, enabling Pre-released updates (trusty-proposed) in Software & Updates > Updates. After the system updated.
I ran,
sudo apt-get upgrade
Rebooted and unity desktop came back 100%
I hope that this works for all of you.
P.S During my week of frustration I discovered Timeshift which creates a backup of your system, no personal files so you can revert to a previous state prior to any updates etc..
Ill never do a system update again without a backup to be able to revert to.
Source: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/timeshift-provides-system-restore-functionality-in-ubuntu.html
PPA installation:
sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install timeshift
After an upgrade yesterday my system (DELL XPS with Intel graphics) got the same problem after a restart this morning.
First I checked the packages which were updated yesterday:
ls -latr /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list
The update yesterday contained different libgl1* packages. So I started to check their content and the libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64 package was the one I searched for:
dpkg -L libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64
The broken shared object i965_dri.so is part of this package. I checked for an older version of that package with:
apt-cache showpkg libgl1-mesa-dri
and decided to use the version 10.1.0-4ubuntu5 .
WARNING: Do not start with my commands till you read to the end!!!
sudo apt-get purge libgl1-mesa-dri
This leads to a long list of packages which I need to purge:
sudo apt-get purge libqt5gui5
sudo apt-get purge libgl1-mesa-dri
sudo apt-get purge libgl1-mesa-dev
sudo apt-get purge libgl1-mesa-glx
sudo apt-get purge mesa-common-dev
sudo apt-get purge libglapi-mesa
BUT if you purge all of those packages you will purge some other important packages, for me at the least unity, libunity-core-6.0-9, ubuntu-session, cairo-dock and most important xserver-xorg.
First I installed then libgl1-mesa-dri in the older version:
B=10.1.0-4ubuntu5
sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri=$B
Then I reinstalled the other purged libs, without the libqt5gui5, in the older version:
sudo apt-get install libglapi-mesa=$B
sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev=$B
sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx=$B
sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dev=$B
Afterwards I installed the missing packages which I need:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg
sudo apt-get install libunity-core-6.0-9=$A unity=$A
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-session
Also I decided to use an older version of unity, just to be sure.
If you want to use an older version set A=7.2.0+14.04.20140423-0ubuntu1.2
if not just remove the =$A behind the packages.
My system is running fine again after these steps. Just the background image was not there and I need to reinstall the cairo-dock, but the config of my old dock was still there.
I can't guarantee that this is a complete rollback description for everyones system. There could be more missing packages which need to be reinstalled after the purging. This may some experience to find, what is missing... For me especially the missing ubuntu-session was a problem to find.
Also the missing Xserver was a little bit annoying after a restart because I didn't know whether the wlan is working at the recovery mode or not, but it is working fine and the the xserver-xorg installation was not a problem.
@Back.Slash: Did you open a ticket for this issue at launchpad ? For me it clearly looks like a bug at the shared object.
I too had this problem on an Asus Zenbook after an upgrade. Then I noticed that it was only for my main account on the machine, but if I logged in with another account it was OK. In the end this solved it for me:
mv ~/.config/dconf/user ~/.config/dconf/user-back
(I only used mv in case of any disaster it might cause.)
Rebooted, and all was well.
Slash. I too had problems with Unity after upgrading from 12.04. Although the symptoms where different, I believe the same fix might also do it for you:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
It will seamlessly re-install the desktop environment. Afterwards you might also need to re-start your session and set the theme back to the default.