If you have installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Alpha 1, you will notice the new Unity interface and hence no Gnome Panel(s) anymore. Since “Run Application” dialog is a part of gnome-panel, it is not possible to enable the same “Run Application” dialog. If you wish, you can achieve that by running the gnome-panel, but this is not the recommended course of action if you wish to keep running unity.
So, the other way to make it work is to use third party run dialogs from repositories. One of the best run dialog is gmrun. It is available in Ubuntu universe repositories. Open up the terminal (by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T) and type in the following to launch Synaptic Package Manager: Continue Reading
[SOLVED] Alt+F2 (Run Application dialog) stopped working
October 31st, 2010 Permalink
UPDATE: I figured the problem was due to messed up compiz settings. Disabling and enabling compiz (Right Click on Desktop>Change Desktop Background>Visual Effects None and then again to Normal or Extra) fixed it. The older post follows.