How do I select unity?

[Dave Rove]

I want to add Unity as a login option. After Googling for how, I installed it with
sudo apt-get install unity

That installed apparently without any problems. But how do I select it? The appearance of the login screen has changed but I don't see how to choose a different desktop. I've rebooted several times, Googled a whole lot more, but I can't figure out how to select Unity. What am I missing, please?

This is what my login screen looks like:


(Original install: Kubuntu 14.10 64 bit)

[NickStone]

I cannot remember which icon in the top right hand corner, but one of those icons when, clicked, will display a drop down menu that will display all the available desktops installed.

[Dave Rove]

I cannot remember which icon in the top right hand corner, but one of those icons when, clicked, will display a drop down menu that will display all the available desktops installed.

I've clicked through all of them and I assure you that desktop selection is not included. They all do other things.

[NickStone]

I should have asked you before, what DM is it? Is it lightDM?

[Dave Rove]

I should have asked you before, what DM is it? Is it lightDM?

Yes. After ploughing through pages of Google hits (and obviously mostly misses) of "Kubuntu install Unity", I've stumbled across the way to restore LightDM's "KDE Greeter" i.e. add "greeter-session=lightdm-kde-greeter" to "/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf".

So the login theme is now as before and underneath the user icons and password box there's what I think should be the desktop selection menu, but that only offers "KDE Plasma Workspace". No sign of Unity.

[oshunluvr]

I installed Ubuntu to a virtual machine, after that was done, installed lxde, then logged out.

I can now select either Unity, Openbox, or LXDE at log in by clicking on the Ubuntu logo to the right of my username in the log-in box.

[NickStone]

This maybe of help to you -> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CustomXSession

especially the section LightDM configuration

When installed Kubuntu was KDM default login manager? And if so, did you replace KDM with lightDM?

[Dave Rove]

I've installed the "gnome" package and I now have four variants of Gnome added to the menu and those work OK, but still no Unity.

You'd think Gnome would have been installed as a dependency of Unity, since it's a Gnome shell, but evidently not.

I'm guessing that the "unity" package has a missing dependency that's only a problem if you don't start with the vanilla Ubuntu.

[NickStone]

Can you tell us how you installed Unity? Can you display the packages that were installed?

In fact just in case some packages were missed, can you perform the following command

sudo apt-get install unity-desktop

[Dave Rove]

It's "ubuntu-desktop" that's the whole shebang, and I'd guess that's probably what would work.

I've hesitated to install that, because in my Google searches, I'd stumbled across a number of posts saying that was overkill, would bring in a complete set of alternative apps that would clutter up the menus, and that "unity" alone was sufficient. It might have worked in previous years but maybe not now.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, you must be right. I went back and installed Kubuntu-desktop and it works too. I did not change to the kde-greeter though...

[Dave Rove]

OK, "ubuntu-desktop" does indeed add "ubuntu" (i.e. unity) to the login menu. And it does indeed install a whole mess of apps. So I guess that the posts that I'd found that said installing the "unity" package was enough are no longer valid.

I've reverted to yesterday's backup for now. When I need to test stuff in Unity, I'll install "ubuntu-desktop" and revert again when I've finished.

OK, thanks all. I'll mark this as solved.

[vinnywright]

OK, "ubuntu-desktop" does indeed add "ubuntu" (i.e. unity) to the login menu. And it does indeed install a whole mess of apps. So I guess that the posts that I'd found that said installing the "unity" package was enough are no longer valid.

I've reverted to yesterday's backup for now. When I need to test stuff in Unity, I'll install "ubuntu-desktop" and revert again when I've finished.

OK, thanks all. I'll mark this as solved.

unless your good with the "install ubuntu-desktop-------test--------restore a backup" thing (by the way having both unity and KDE-plasma will throw your testing off from a unity only environment) you should consider adding an additional partition and just install Ubuntu to it and dual boot between the 2

@hear I have ubuntu-14.14 Kubuntu-14.04 and Kubuntu-14.10 to chose from at boot + as soon as I make up my mind to do it I will be adding 15.04

vinny@vinny-Bonobo-Extreme:~$ sudo parted -l
[sudo] password for vinny: 
Model: ATA HGST HTS725050A7 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      8225kB  323GB  323GB   primary   ext4            boot  [COLOR=#800080]<------------------ Ubuntu-14.04LTS[/COLOR]
 3      323GB   379GB  56.3GB  primary   ext4  [COLOR=#800080]<----------------Kubuntu-14.04LTS[/COLOR]
 4      379GB   496GB  117GB   extended
 5      379GB   436GB  57.0GB  logical   ext4 [COLOR=#800080]<------------------Kubuntu-14.10[/COLOR]
 6      436GB   496GB  59.8GB  logical   ext4 [COLOR=#800080]<-------------------empty waiting for me to make up my mind[/COLOR]
 2      496GB   500GB  4295MB  primary   linux-swap(v1)


Model: ATA HGST HTS721010A9 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
 1      1049kB  1000GB  1000GB  ext4         primary [COLOR=#800080]<--------------storage with ~/(Kubuntu home folders linked)[/COLOR]

[claydoh]

What you need to discover is which bit is the one that contains the unity xsession, which would take some digging around


THIS seems to be a way to not pull in everything:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-desktop