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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Ubuntu update broke Lightdm

Every once in a while, I see the Software Update icon show up in the Unity Dock.  I try to stay on top of keeping the system up to date.  This time around, it asked to reboot my laptop.  I let it reboot, since reboots are pretty quick.  To my surprise, X didn't start up after the reboot!  This is the type of thing that got me fed up with Gentoo as a desktop/laptop distro.  Ubuntu isn't supposed to run into these types of problems.  I got on my desktop and started googling.  I read about various reports of the "Lightdm" app not working.  I decided to switch to VT1 and check on what is going on.  Eventually, I discovered that killing 'X' would force Lightdm to load.

root      1157  1113  3 13:47 tty7     00:00:00 /usr/bin/X :0 -core -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch

For a long term fix, most people just suggested switching to GDM.  GDM is what I used in Gentoo, so I decided to switch to it.  Most instructions told me to uninstall Lightdm first.  When I ran

apt-get remove lightdm

I got a message telling me that it would uninstall 'ubuntu-desktop' as well.  That isn't what I wanted.  I decided to install GDM without uninstalling lightdm.  When I ran

apt-get install gdm

I got an Ncurses interface that let me select with display manager would be used.  After selecting GDM and rebooting, my laptop was usable again.

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