I had a bit of a problem today. It’s been raining so I was mucking around with desktop effects in my new Hardy Heron install.

I miss-clicked something.

The result was I lost all windows, menu’s and task bars. They were hidden so I think I was playing around with window opacity.

I could ALT+TAB between windows but nothing would show on the screen.

Seeing as all configuration in Linux is in text files I went hunting.

I did a CTRL+ALT+F5 to bring up a terminal window, logged in and I found the following in my home directory:

.gnome2
.gnome2_private
.gconf

A quick look told me these were the gnome display settings for my GUI interface so I deleted them with:

rm -rf .gnome2 .gnome2_private .gconf

followed by a CTRL+ALT+DEL

All back to normal. I reapplied the basic effects I had before I tinkered, and I’m happily working again.

Phew! I was thinking for a moment (just a small moment) that I would need to re-install.

Tags: Linux, technology, ubuntu