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I tried to clean some packages up and wound up screwing something up.

Now, it no longer boots to a graphic window: I get a terminal login screen.

I'm using xfce4 and I can use the startx command to enter the graphical environment, but I'd prefer to go straight to a graphic login, user-screen and so on.

Ubuntu 18.04 latest.

Mike Robinson
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2 Answers2

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Clean away the wreckage of the old Desktop Environment before reinstalling xfce by

sudo apt purge  '~n^libxfce4.*' '~n^libexo.*' '~n^libgarcon.*'
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
K7AAY
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    I don't want to use all of "xubuntu-desktop" just "xfce4." The apt purge you listed didn't find anything to purge. But things like libxfce4 did. Trying it now. (what appears as italics is string enclosed by asterisks) – Mike Robinson Feb 26 '20 at 19:27
  • Excellent! Hope you will post your own answer here, as it would be far superior to mine. – K7AAY Feb 26 '20 at 19:34
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    I'm letting it do the xubuntu-desktop install after all. Man, that's a lot of software! – Mike Robinson Feb 26 '20 at 19:39
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    It still doesn't boot into a GUI. Note however that systemctl get-default does return graphical.target! So it seems to me that it's supposed to be going GUI! – Mike Robinson Feb 26 '20 at 19:43
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I think I found out what was going wrong but not why.

In /var/log/syslog I see:

 lightdm.service Main process exited, coe=exited, status=1/FAILURE
 lightdm.service failed with result 'exit-code'

I then followed the suggestion given here ... Lightdm not starting on boot ...

... and used the dpkg-reconfigure command to choose gdm3.

Magically, it worked!

Mike Robinson
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