Preferences programs won't start

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen]

I'm testing natty on an amd64 system upgraded from previous Ubuntu versions. I'm trying to change my preferences, and the only way I've found (bug 748070) that I might achieve that is to know the name of the Gnome preferences program I want, search for it, and then click on its icon as it appears in the search box.

When I do that, nothing useful happens. The search box goes away, but no preferences program appears.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

You can find a system settings overview at the bottom of the session
("power off") menu, on the top right of the screen.

As for the error starting, try starting the relevant program from a
terminal window (Ctrl-Alt-T) and then see if it prints any error
messages while it is starting.

Mark

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

can you say specifically which preferences program isn't starting? i tried a few and they all started.

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

Found the problem. Since I had to do an apt-get dist-upgrade (update-manager won't do the trick on this machine) the upgrade seems to have been incomplete, leaving me with an uninstallable ubuntu-desktop package and many packages missing.

Once I fixed this, and thanks to Mark's hint of where to find the preferences, I was able to start configuration problems.

Technically it may be wrong that preferences programs like Appearance, Mouse and what have you appeared in the application search when the programs weren't installed, but it shouldn't affect normal users.

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

Ahem. Start configuration *programs*, that is.