I'm running a DELL inspiron 3537 with 64 Ubuntu 14.04.
After asking around I've decided to install the drivers for the computer. Here's what I did:
- install the intel driver from here
- reboot (everything was fine)
- install the amd driver from here
- reboot
Now, greeter was working just fine, but when logging in, there's just blank. No unity, no desktop, no nothing. No reaction either. The mouse works, its not freezing and I can go to the tty screens back and forth fine. lightdm is running
I went to tty1 and tried opening a browser by typing google-chrome. I got an error message saying gtk-warning: cannot open display.
After some more digging I figured out I could do export DISPLAY=:0 and then run GUI apps.
The first thing I did was install the compiz manager, and - as I suspected, unity was disabled. So I re-enabled it, along with openGL (and some other stuff that unity required). Still nothing.
I kept trying different things, but to no avail. Finally, I think I'm on to something - almost every single app I'm tryng to run complains about not being able to load libGL.so.1. I've googled for that, and ended up installing a package called libgl1-mesa-glx, but even after rebooting I'm still getting the problem.
Another thing I've noticed is that there's no xorg.xconf file in /etc/X11/. There are a few backups and a failsafe conf files. I tried stopping lightdm, then copying some of them to it, like so:
sudo service lightdm stop
sudo cp xorg.xcong-backup-14091923423.conf xorg.conf
sudo service lightdm start
But then it fails to start. Removing the file solves the issue. I have tried with several of the backups, but nothing.
I'm still suspecting that libgGL.so.1 thing. I can locate it on the computer in a few places, here are a few relevant ones I think:
/home/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1
/home/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1.2.0
/home/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1
/home/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1.2.0
update
ldconfig -p | grep libGL told me that the library had a symlink to the wrong directory (namely, /usr/lib/ instead of /home/usr/lib). I've added a symlink there, and now nautilus launches when logging in, but still no unity launcher or panel on top.
