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This evening I was attempting to disable the guest account and something went awry.

Currently on boot Ubuntu enters low graphics mode. No specific error report.

What did I do? Before this error occurred I added a line of code in lightdm.conf to disable the guest account. I think I may have accidentally erased the contents of lightdm.conf. Not entirely sure.

I troubleshooted for the past hour using various suggestions from other Questions to no avail.

Jorge Castro
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user79318
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    Please add the contents of your lightdm.conf to your question. – Jorge Castro Jul 26 '12 at 02:19
  • I assume you meant low graphics mode? – mfisch Jul 26 '12 at 02:21
  • Yes I meant low graphics mode. My mistake.

    As for the contents. How would I check that? I am not able to access the desktop. The most I am able to do from the Ubuntu partition is access the terminal through ctrl+alt+f1 from the low graphics menu.

     – user79318 Jul 26 '12 at 02:25
  • I guess you'd have to type in the contents from another PC, not very practical unless you can copy the files to another system. I'd also love to have a look at your log file, /var/log/lightdm.log. If you want a short-cut, just use type in the conf file I posted below. – mfisch Jul 26 '12 at 02:37

2 Answers2

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There is an example version of lightdm.conf at:

/usr/share/doc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.gz

You can see it with zcat /usr/share/doc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.gz.

Eliah Kagan
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user72421
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We can't do much debugging without your lightdm.conf file, but if you want a minimal version that will work, try this one:

[SeatDefaults]
user-session=ubuntu
greeter-session=unity-greeter
allow-guest=false

EDIT: For future reference, you can make many changes to lightdm.conf easily and safely with the tool /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults, including disabling the guest session.

Try it next time. Run it without any arguments to see all the options. /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -l false will disable the guest account.

Jorge Castro
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mfisch
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  • The file was similar before I edited it. I currently cannot access the desktop. How would I go about editing the file from low graphics mode? – user79318 Jul 26 '12 at 02:36
  • Control-Alt-F1 to drop to a virtual terminal. Login, then sudo vi /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf – mfisch Jul 26 '12 at 02:40
  • So did it work? – mfisch Jul 26 '12 at 02:49
  • I'll have a go at it tomorrow, getting late. Deliver an update then. Thanks for the advice – user79318 Jul 26 '12 at 02:49
  • You can also try the tool I mention in my post, it can set the session. I don't know what it will do if the file is totally gone though, but if you're more comfortable with that than vi, give it a shot. Also run it with sudo. – mfisch Jul 26 '12 at 02:53
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    @user79318 vi may be difficult for novices, so I recommend you use sudo nano. Ctrl+O(the letter, not the number) followed by Enter(twice, I think) saves, and Ctrl+X exits. – nanofarad Jul 26 '12 at 14:24
  • So unfortunately the error was more than just debugging lightdm.conf. I ended up just taking everything of value out of Home and doing a clean install. Thanks for the help anyway – user79318 Jul 27 '12 at 11:03