Take the 2-minute tour ×

I installed cinnamon and uninstall unity using a terminal command I found on the web, but I skipped some steps on removing unity thinking it was not important. Now, when I turn on my laptop it will only boot to terminal, it doesn't go to to log in screen to log in to cinnamon desktop or gnome classic. How can I fix this?

share|improve this question
Have you tried starting the login manager manually? Try sudo service lightdm start –  Glutanimate Oct 6 '12 at 11:17
Thanks. That does it. –  markuz Oct 6 '12 at 12:37

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

First try to repair the display manager

  1. start lightdm service, it is maybe stopped

    sudo service lightdm start
  2. reconfigure, In case the first option doesn't work

    sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
  3. reinstall. The worst case

    sudo apt-get install --reinstall lightdm

I suggest you to install Gnome. It's my preferred Desktop Environment

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
share|improve this answer
For configuration problems (rather than corrupted files), it is usually sufficient to run sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm. Since sudo service lightdm start worked (see comments on the question), this would most likely have been sufficient. But it is important to know about sudo apt-get install --reinstall lightdm too, as that will fix corrupted files in lightdm. –  Eliah Kagan Oct 6 '12 at 13:48

Tou need a display manager. Try xinit or startx commands. If your gui starts, you need to install a display manager, which lets you log into a gui session. Because you uninstalled Unity, you probably removed lightdm, the default display manager in Ubuntu. So you can either install gdm or lightdm. I suggest gdm, because you have Cinnamon installed:

sudo apt-get install <your choice here>

If your gui didn't start after xinit or startx, you need to install your preferred gui environment again. I haven't used cinnamon before, so I would direct you to http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/09/20/install-cinnamon-1-6-in-ubuntu-12-04-lts/ .

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


