After recently wiping out a perfectly good installation of Ubuntu 12.04 while playing around with DiskDump, circumstances led me to install Ubuntu 12.10. I promptly installed MATE, and then uninstalled a few MATE-related applicationss, and logged out of the MATE session. And then, oh, boy -- talk about curiosity killing the cat!
I was unable to login to Ubuntu or MATE; in fact, the MATE option wasn't there. Entering my password brought me back to the login screen; I could only do two things: start a Guest session, or start a terminal session (Ctrl-Alt-F1). The Guest session was frustrating as I has no access to the sqw user's files and the Guest space was only about 500 MB (?) -- I was unable to reformat a flash drive, or run Unetbootin, which I attributed to a Guest's lack of privileges. In the terminal I could start an x-session; this gave me a kind of access to my files but without Unity elements; launching Nautilus allowed me to somewhat navigate files but disks did not visibly mount and applications had to be launched from the terminal.
Ctrl-Alt-F1= terminal session from login screen
Ctrl-Alt-F7= back to login screen from terminal session
In C-A-F1 terminal session I tried a few things that I found in Ubuntu forums. I also removed the MATE installation -- none of this seemed to make any difference.
In C-A-F1 terminal session you can theoretically launch sessions from the prompt $ (after authentication):
startx -- default desktop
unity -- this failed; lots of compiz warnings
unity-2d-shell -- This option not recognized in 12.10 terminal
gnome-shell -- terminal responded there was no gnome-shell installed but could be via sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
sudo service lightdm start -- will start the lightdm Unity greeter login screen; this case terminal said it was already running
It seemed to me that it wasn't a permissions issue; I hadn't so much lost the key as missplaced the door. I crossed my fingers and installed the gnome-shell. At one point in the terminal install a graphical screen came up for the user to choose the window manager GWM or DM (which was checked) I left it that way. Install was very fast. At the prompt, "gnome-shell" resulted in an error. I restarted, and the login screen showed both Gnome and Ubuntu session options; I was able to login to a Gnome session, and then an Ubuntu session. Seemingly installing gnome-session had replaced what was missing.
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