Appearance became messed up after "update"

Support & Help Requests
,
#1

I recently acquired a new (Dell) laptop, got Ubuntu and the Mate desktop installed, and got things customised pretty much to my satisfaction.

Then this morning (foolishly, I guess) I chose to “update” my system by going to System -> Administration -> Software Updater.

After that was done my desktop became slightly mangled. Three problems are immediately apparent:

(1) In the bottom panel of my desktop I have “Window list” installed.
The icons for the open windows in this panel are now tiny, and get stacked on top of one another, two at a time. Ugly and inconvenient.

(2) When I open a terminal (which I do a lot; I used the command line interface heavily) the “menu” has the words immediately juxtaposed, as in

FIleEditViewSearchTeminalHelp

with no spaces. (This was not previously the case!) Things are “alright” with the “High Contrast” themes, but all of the others are messed up.

(3) The main menu bar item (left side of top panel) has its names similarly messed up:

ApplicationsPlacesSystem

with no spaces between the words.

In addition to these three problems there are a few other glitches that I won’t go into.

What on earth would have caused this, and what if anything can I do about it?

I have tried uninstalling and re-installing Mate (to no avail).

#2

In terminal:

inxi -S

Please post the output.

#3

v3xx

In terminal:

|inxi -S|

Please post the output.

The output is:

$ inxi -s
inxi: Command not found.

Thanks.

cheers,

Rolf

#4

What version of Ubuntu MATE are you using?
16.04 should have the inxi command.
14.04 themes should not see that much updates.

2 Likes
#5

You should be able to install inxi in terminal:

sudo apt-get install inxi

And thats inxi -S not inxi -s

1 Like
#6

I am running (according to “lsb_release -a”) version 16.04.1.

Nevertheless inxi wasn’t there. I installed it, with no difficulty
following the instructions of v3xx.

cheers,

Rolf

#7

I thought I had posted the results of “inxi -S” — I replied to an email from “v3.xx”, which said I that I could post by replying to the email. (This worked in respect of my reply to “oumourov”!) However I don’t see my post. So here are the results:

System: Host: SC-STAT-364945 Kernel: 4.4.0-38-generic x86_64 (64 bit)
Desktop: MATE 1.16.0 Distro: Ubuntu 16.04 xenial

Does that tell anyone anything? Can anyone help me out here? I’m getting desperate! :slight_smile:

#8

Create a new user (or use the Guest user) and see if the problem exists there.

Have you compiled MATE yourself? How did you get MATE 1.16 at Ubuntu MATE 16.04? I have added the xenial ppa for MATE and my MATE version is 1.14.1.

#9

@ThanosApostolou is probably on the right track with his questions.
Please post the output of:

inxi -r

#10

In response to ThanosApostolou (message 8):

and then clicking on “install guidelines”. explicitly:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-extras

I realise now that the instructions refer to MATE 1.81 (!!!) but they seemed to work at the time. And everything seemed OK until I did the “System Update” of my Ubuntu system.

Should I “purge” the current installation of MATE and do a different install? If so, what exactly should I do? (Please be as explicit as you can; I’m rather uneducated in respect of these matters.)

#11

In response to ouroumov (message 9):

“Please post the output of: inxi -r”

I tried to, but got a message saying that I could only create 2 links in a post, and the aforementioned output was/is full of links, the first two being

Repos: Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list
deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus - Release amd64 (20160420.1)]/ xenial main restricted
deb http://nz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial main restricted

How can I show the full output?

#12

Even inside code blocks? ( the </> symbol )

#13

Mate 1.16 is under development and will have bugs in it. I do not see how you managed to install this.

I think its best for you to reinstall.

#14

The “code blocks” business was what I didn’t (and needed to) know.

But I cannot get it to work. I clicked on the “</>” symbol before pasting in the output of “inxi -r” but this didn’t help.

Can you give me more explicit instructions, or point me to where I can find them please?

#15

Can you give me a recipe for “reinstalling”?

Do I need to/should I remove/purge the currently installed version first?
If so, what is the recipe? “sudo apt-get … <what?>” ???

#16

Do you wish to keep Ubuntu (Unity)? Do you have windows installed? What about just going with a Ubuntu Mate install?

Maybe do a bit of reading first.

Install Ubuntu (Mate) using "Something else" method

GParted partition guide for Linux and Windows users

Ubuntu Mate Update Guide

#17

October 4

rolf:

what is the recipe?

Do you wish to keep Ubuntu (Unity)?

Yes.

Do you have windows installed?

No. I don’t do Windoze!

What about just going with a Ubuntu Mate install?

Sure. But I’ll have to find out how.

Maybe do a bit of reading first.

OK.

The following material appears to imply that you are suggesting that I
re-install Ubuntu, rather than just reinstalling Mate. Is this correct?

#18

The choice is totally up to you.

#19

@rolf Can you give us a screenshot of Software & Updates application at the Other Software tab (make sure you expand the window so that all the repositories are shown)?

Any chance that you are using this ppa: https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/mate-1.16? This is the only way that I know of how to install MATE 1.16 on Ubuntu 16.04.

#20

Can you give us a screenshot of |Software & Updates| application at the
|Other Software| tab (make sure you expand the window so that all the
repositories are shown)?

Here's the follow-up with "bottomhalf.png".

cheers,

Rolf