After months of clicking the “remind me later” button when prompted to upgrade, I finally too the plunge.
And as I feared, things went wrong 🙁

• Once the upgrade complete, I was greeted with a grey screen when opening VNC (I do everything “headless”)
  • Even with changes to the vnc startup file, I’d end up with no unity launcher and no task bar
• The keyboard was messed up:
  • Impossible to type ‘s’
  • Typing ‘d’ minimised everything
  • ‘up’ maximized the window (no access to previous command in the terminal)
• Apache was not working anymore

Needless to say I was not a happy bunny.

After hours of “googling” (I know there’s no such word), endless changes to vnc config, dconf, and reboot, I finally managed to fix everything:

• The fix for the grey screen / lack of unity launcher / lack of task bar was settled by changing my ~/.vnc/xstartup with the below:

  • #!/bin/sh
    
    def
    export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
    unset SESSION_MANAGER
    unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
    
    vncconfig -iconic &
    x-window-manager &
    gnome-panel &
    gnome-settings-daemon &
    metacity &
    nautilus -n &
    gnome-terminal &
    gnome-session -session=ubuntu &

  • This didn’t fully resolve the issue as the look and feel is the old, pre-unity desktop, with top and bottom bars, no side launcher. But at least I can work with that for now.
• I fixed the keyboard layout with the dconf tool:
  • If not yet installed, type

    sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

  • Then type

    dconf-editor

    and you should get this:

  • Go to desktop > ibus > general and tick the box “use-system-keyboard-layout“:
  • Then go to org > gnome > desktop > vm > keybindings and replace any entry with the work “super” with “[]”:
• Websites have a new path under Apache. Whereas it used to be under /var/www/, the default path is now /var/www/html/.
  • Of course as I upgraded, I decided to keep my settings, which pretty much rendered everything useless.
  • I ended up completely removing Apache and reinstalling it with these commands:

  • sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get purge apache2
    sudo apt-get install apache2

  • All I had left to do was to more the content of /var/www/ to /var/www/html/

Everything is now working again 🙂