Someone please help!

Younger brother/sister have Acer A110 netbooks with linux linpus. They both wanted messenger accounts to chat with friends and online I found that you needed to run the live update due to MSN updates or something.

As soon as the update finished the internet connection was lost on both netbooks. I think they re-started them, one started fine and we were able to enter the network key and connect with no problems. The other one is a real problem though, the start bar thing that usually appears across the bottom of the screen has vanished, no icons for the battery status, internet, the clock or the power symbol etc... everything has just gone. Double clicking or right clicking in the area does nothing whatsoever.

In the top left of the screen a strange grey box has appeared covering part of the top corner of the desktop. I've tried to attach an image of it, but it's from a camera phone so very small and not great quality. In the grey box is a small icon/symbol like a sun. When hovering over is says this program has not yet been configured (or something like that).

Loads of the programs are not working either, but I can get into my documents and the terminal.

Please can someone help, we've no idea what to do!!

 

The grey thing is a panel - just like the one that's not at the bottom any more. You need to go into panel manager in settings (via the right click menu - if you haven't enabled that, the there are some instructions here). That should let you mess about with the panel and get it back to its rightful spot. It's possible that you've had your icons lost as well.
If so, hit alt-f2, type "xfce4-panel -a" without the speech marks and hit return for a dialog box to add buttons and so on.

However, it's possible that what ever has occurred is more serious than these steps can fix. If so you might want to consider a system recovery (this will wipe everything you've done and take it back to the defaults, so be very sure before you do it)

 

Thanks very much for your post, it's helped with getting the panel back at the bottom.

However, the icon with one computer screen on top of another, is missing and the network connections in settings will not work. Email etc and the other programs are still not working either.

Any other help/ideas of what to do would be greatly appreciated. Would prefer not to restore to factory settings, family live miles away and it would be very difficult talking my Mum through creating the recovery usb drive and restoring it.

Thanks in advance

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, didn't spot the msg at the top about only posting non technical info here until I'd already posted my question. Please feel free to move this question somewhere more suitable if needed, just so long as I can find it.

 

Oh dear, does sound like they've broken more than just moving the panel - perhaps the original panel was lost, and that's a new one.
Have you tried the xfce4-panel -a yet? It's possible that restoring the right things to the panel will solve the problem, although I'm starting to doubt that. When you say email doesn't work, do you mean you can't send/receive any more, or that the program won't even launch?

I'd wait and see if someone can suggest a miracle cure, but you may well be reaching for the restore disk

 

Thanks MarkH, did the panel xfce4 thing, managed to get rid of the little panel and created a new one adding the original items.

The problem is that he didn't do anything to make this happen. Both netbooks had the live update running at the same time, the internet connection was lost and while one of the netbooks was fine, this one isn't and I can't see any reason why it should be different. I'm not sure if the bottom panel had dissapeared before the netbook was turned off and on again though.

Really don't want to do the restore :cry:

 

Did the recovery and re-installed linpus. Netbook wouldn't boot up afterwards, stuck with a black screen and white mouse arrow/cursor. Did the recovery again and this time no problems, live update completed fine and all problems fixed. What a pain!! But glad to finally have it sorted.

 

Well, I'm glad you sorted it, but I'm sorry it was such a radical fix. May I suggest that, once it's set up right with all updates etc, you make a backup. The method on Macle's blog works very nice and easily: http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/12/acer ... ackup.html