Hi guys, I was recently using a test build of VirtualBox on my Fedora 38 machine. I wanted to uninstall this test build so I ran a command which, from what I understand, was supposed to uninstall the test build of VirtualBox I had installed:
sudo VirtualBox-7.0.9-158223-Linux_amd64.run uninstall
After running this my terminal crashed and I started getting some weird behavior. I gave my machine a reboot to see if that would sort it out. But that didn’t fix anything. No icons are loading and I can’t start a terminal or open some applications like Firefox.
It seems like the VirtualBox uninstall command uninstalled something it shouldn’t have, but I’m not sure what. I’ve not encountered a problem like this before. Any advice on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
UPDATE: I was able to get to a terminal with ctrl + alt + f2. After trying to reinstall icon packages and getting no where I finally was able to find a solution. The VirtualBox uninstall script seems to break the MIME database. I was able to fix the issue by running this command:
sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime
Then logging out and back in.
Solution was found on this StackExchange post:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/724129/uninstalling-virtualbox-breaks-gnome
Ctl+Alt+F2 can get you to a terminal.
You can switch to another tty to access a command line interface (e.g. Ctrl+alt+F7). Not sure about fedora, but on my distro, the graphical shell is in tty2 (Ctrl+alt+F2), so I can return back to the GUI using Ctrl+alt+F2.
