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After upgrading to 18.04 from 16.04 I get a login screen which looks complete but typing in my password gives the error failed to start session.

I can use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to access tty where logging in is successful but starting almost immediately terminates.

I have read similar solutions about installing ubuntu-session but attempting these gives unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages with the dependencies on gnome-shell and gnome-session-bin listed as unmet dependencies.

k.child90
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3 Answers3

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I took this along to a laptop clinic who solved the issue. The login screen, importantly, looked identical to the 16.04 Unity login screen which betrayed the problem in transferring to 18.04 (which has a very different looking login screen).

In TTY attempting to install certain packages gave unmet dependencies, and following the chain down gave the ligbm1 package at the base. This is the dependency for a lot of unity and xserver packages (attempting startx also failed). Uninstalling ligbm1 and then installing it again allowed installing ubuntu-desktop without error.

k.child90
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What helped me:

  1. Using sudo dpkg --remove [package-name] to remove problematic packages found via sudo dpkg --configure -a (source: this Stack Overflow answer). Some packages couldn't be removed as they were dependencies of another packages.
  2. Running sudo apt-get install -f (it started to working again, yay)
  3. Renaming the org.freedesktop.systemd1.service file as mentioned in this answer
  4. Running sudo apt-get update and dist-upgrade and autoremove, and do-release-upgrade

Kudos to dragans2's post!

Zanna
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mmalmeida
  • 510
-1

The advice in this blog post worked for me:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

If it's already installed try to reinstall it..

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
Zanna
  • 70,465
jeremy ng
  • 1