Upgrading Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 had a problem, the icons of some apps were gone. Here’s how I fixed it – easily.

Ubuntu 11.04 offered an upgrade to 11.10 which was easy enough to make just click the button and poof, the upgrade happens. But after the upgrade Unity showed a number of icons missing and the ubiquitous “no icon” document icon was evident for a number of apps.

Some googling proved worthless so I tried something myself – using the CompizConfig Setting Manager (ccsm) I changed the profile from Unity to Default and found Unity was gone and so was virtually any other control of
Ubuntu. So I went back into CCSM and changed the profile from Default to Unity. When complete the icon were back too!

I don’t know what happened in the upgrade and I don’t know why this fixed the missing icons. It worked however.