3

I upgraded today from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 17.04 because my Guest Mode on 16.04 was first giving no internet connection and then later shutting me out from the Guest Mode.

Ubuntu 17.04 provides no Guest Mode, so I searched and experimented with the answers to these:

Ubuntu 17.04: manually generate guest account

Guest session stopped working on Ubuntu 16.10 and 17.04

Both give me a Guest Mode but cosmetically only on accounts screen because once I click and go into Guest Mode, I cannot go inside Guest Mode to use it - screen goes blank and then shows the accounts screen again.

I am having to use an alternative to Guest Mode by going to User Accounts in main account, and creating calendar date username, example "username-calendar_date" and then deleting it after use.

Zanna
  • 70,465
jam
  • 41

2 Answers2

3

As of late 2017:

Guest Mode was disabled by default after 16.04 due to AppArmor bugs and other problems. It's still in lightdm, as you discovered, but disabled.

The problem has worsened with 17.10's transition to Wayland, which has no provision for a guest session.

Ubuntu devs recently asked if Guest Sessions should be restored. The developers welcome community assistance to make that happen - there's more work than they can handle before 18.04.

user535733
  • 62,253
3

One reason I can think of, why you are bumped back to the login screen when trying to enter a guest session, is that you have something in the /etc/guest-session folder which is not correct. Otherwise, a generic way to examine what goes wrong is to study the log file /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log.

P.S. The file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf does not exist by default, so you can safely delete it.

Gunnar Hjalmarsson
  • 33,540
  • 3
  • 64
  • 94
  • /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf was there by default otherwise how else could I have edited it? /etc/guest-session has nothing there? – jam Nov 20 '17 at 09:39
  • 1
    @jam: If you upgraded to 17.04 from previous Ubuntu versions, there may have been some old /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file left. The file can still safely be removed, if you give up the guest session mode, since the file does not exist on fresh 17.04 installs. If there is nothing in /etc/guest-session, I have no other theory, and suggest you check out the log file. – Gunnar Hjalmarsson Nov 20 '17 at 13:11