Ubuntu 13.10 can't boot into unity

Question

I installed ubuntu 13.10 on my laptop but it won't boot into unity just command line and says running in low graphics mode. How do I fix this.

I have an HP 15-g029wm laptop with amd radeon hd 3330 graphics

Answer 1

You can follow the instructions as shown above by Avinash Raj, and specifically you can do what they tell you to do on this page.

I quote from that page:

"The greeter is invalid. This is a bug in LightDM and a bug report has already been filed.

The reason why you end up with this failsafe X is because the pantheon-greeter you installed along with the elementary desktop is now not available and LightDM is not able to identify an alternative greeter.

As a workaround, you can edit the LightDM conf file and correct the error.

Run the following command in a terminal:

     sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

and change the line

     greeter-session=pantheon-greeter

to

     greeter-session=unity-greeter

and save it.

After changing the file, reboot and you will now be greeted with Unity greeter."

If this workaround does not do the trick for you, my suggestion is to install the following packages in the terminal console (press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login with your username and password):

     sudo apt-get install mdm

MDM is a very friendly login greeter app with a highly customizable interface. You will be prompted when installing mdm to choose your default display manager, and you can choose mdm instead of lightdm and press ok to finish installing MDM. If, for any reason, you want to revert your display manager back to LighDM, you can do so by running the following code in the terminal console:

     sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

You should also install a decent video driver for your video card from the official support page for Radeon cards. They have drivers for both 32bit and 64bit Linux/ Ubuntu, and you can install them easily with just a few clicks.

You can also install:

    sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

    sudo apt-get install xfce4*

Reboot and when you get to the MDM greeter, you can choose to boot into the xfce session, and not the gnome session or unity. This way you'll be able to get to a graphical desktop session, install your video driver and maybe fix the issues you're having with unity greeter so you be able to login into a Gnome session too.