No programs or applications show up in dash [duplicate]

I just upgraded my Ubuntu 11.10 (x86) to Ubuntu 12.04 (x86). The upgrade completed without any errors.

Since then, I am unable to access any of the applications in the Dash. The Dash seems to be empty. When I search for some application like gedit, it says "Sorry, there is nothing that matches your search".

Is there any way to fix it?

None of these fixes worked for me. But after more searching:

rm ~/.cache/software-center -R

worked like a charm. I did need to run:

unity --reset &

afterwards though, for the changes to take effect within dash, but the software center just started working straightaway.

You should ensure that you have these 2 packages installed:

• For 12.10 and older:

  • unity-place-applications
  • unity-place-files

• For newer versions:

  • unity-lens-applications
  • unity-lens-files

Then logout/login and you will get back you the 2 lenses and the search will search applications and files.

In my case none of the solutions above worked.

The solution I found:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/zeitgeist

Then close your session and login again, and dash worked again.

Same here. After upgrading from 11.04 to 11.10 to 12.04 (beta2) the DASH menu doesn't list any applications. Previously typing "calc" for example would list the calculator and LibreOffice Calc. Now, nothing shows up, neither in the main DASH window, nor in the application lens.

However, in the main lens songs (FLAC) do show up, but for instance documents don't. Furthermore, I have regular crashes of unity-lens-video. Apport told me this problem had already been reported. Maybe this is related?

Looking a bit closer in ~/.xsession-errors I found that the zeitgeist daemon crashed:

(zeitgeist-datahub:2329): LibZeitgeist-CRITICAL **: Unable to connect to Zeitgeist daemon: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.zeitgeist.Engine: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process /usr/bin/zeitgeist-daemon exited with status 1

According to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zeitgeist/+bug/986191 this happens when upgrading from Ubuntu 11.04 to 12.04. Removing ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite solves the problem. I tried it and it works :-).

I just encountered this problem earlier today on my laptop. It surprised me, given that I couldn't think of any reason it didn't show up until now.

After some struggling, I eventually resolved the issue by opening a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T if you don't already have it pinned to the launcher) and using unity --replace &. (You could probably also do this with Unity's Alt+F2 prompt, but it too went missing for me at the time.)