Showing posts with label List of Ubuntu releases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label List of Ubuntu releases. Show all posts

G'day MATE, hello Gnome Fallback

Posted by Unknown


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.