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I am new to Ubuntu, and I am working on a Mac. The Ubuntu installation was done by someone else. I logged in with the user name and password, but I'm not sure what next to do in the terminal to get to the graphical interface. Could someone assist or point me in a direction where I can get useful guidelines? I have done research, but nothing I found helped me.

When I tried to start the lightdm greeter, I got the following message:

lightdm.service not found

Update: My understanding is that Ubuntu Server is installed.

karel
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S.Coertzen
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    What has been installed? What are you trying to get? Maybe your installation does not have a GUI. – Pilot6 Sep 28 '16 at 13:09
  • Possible duplicate of https://askubuntu.com/questions/2093/how-to-install-gui-desktop-on-a-server – David Foerster Feb 12 '18 at 20:33
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    @DavidFoerster This question is not a duplicate of https://askubuntu.com/questions/2093/how-to-install-gui-desktop-on-a-server because the OP is not asking how to install a GUI on Ubuntu Server. Instead he's asking how to login in a situation in which he doesn't know that no GUI is installed by default in Ubuntu Server. – karel Feb 13 '18 at 14:37

2 Answers2

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Ubuntu Server does not include a graphical user interface by default. If you are connected to the system console you will see a screen similar to the following:

enter image description here

To login to Ubuntu Server from the above screen:

  1. At the login: prompt type your username and press Enter.

  2. At the Password: prompt type your user password and press Enter.

To install the default Ubuntu desktop environment (Unity) in Ubuntu Server run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo reboot

These commands will also install the LightDM greeter so that you can login to the Ubuntu desktop environment from a nice login screen.

If you logged in at the system console, one of the following two commands will bring up a GUI login screen to login to the Ubuntu desktop environment.

sudo systemctl start graphical.target # Ubuntu 15.04 and later

or

sudo service lightdm start # Ubuntu 12.04/14.04
karel
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I am also very new to Ubuntu so you can try the following things, which solved a similar problem for me:

  1. Try ctrl+alt+f1 (try all from f1 to f11), I just got stuck yesterday on a virtual machine and realized that there is more than 1 terminal in Ubuntu

  2. You can also try the command 

    startx

This will show if you have ubuntu-desktop environment installed.

Zanna
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user2849789
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  • I am not connected to the internet, because I do not know how to connect through the terminal, I did read about how to connect through wifi bit I could not get it to work, if this is any useful I am working on a Mac if something is different, of what it could be on other OS – S.Coertzen Sep 28 '16 at 13:31
  • Try this command: dpkg -l ubuntu-desktop . It will tell you if you have the desktop ui installed – user2849789 Sep 28 '16 at 13:37
  • dpkg-query: no packages found matching ubuntu-desktop (reply i received) – S.Coertzen Sep 28 '16 at 13:43
  • You dont have the UI components installed I think, maybe just wait for more experienced users to help in installing it, just also add the output of the following command: lsb_release -a (It will help in understanding the version of Ubuntu you are running) – user2849789 Sep 28 '16 at 13:48