I am running Ubuntu 14.04 with Gnome as the Desktop Environment. When I boot, I want it to be quick, and drop into a shell.
I'll enter my username and password, and if I require, I will start the GUI.
What this necessarily means is that I want to start the GUI. whenever I run startx, The full GUI is not loaded. All my icons are there, the wallpaper is there, and I believe the window manager is also there. But the top pane is not there. How do I do this?
This is done by booting into text mode:
make a backup by running the command below:
sudo cp -n /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.orig
If for some reason you want to revert to original settings, just run command below in terminal:
sudo mv /etc/default/grub.orig /etc/default/grub && sudo update-grub
To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. When it opens, follow the below steps:
Copy and paste below command into terminal and hit enter:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
This opens Grub boot loader config file with text editor.
Do below changes:
Comment the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”, by adding # at the beginning, which will disable the Ubuntu purple screen.
Change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="text", this makes Ubuntu boot directly into Text Mode.
Uncomment this line #GRUB_TERMINAL=console, by removing the # at the beginning, this makes Grub Menu into real black & white Text Mode (without background image)
After saved the changes, update grub via command:
sudo update-grub
Restart your computer and see the result.
Read this for more information.
Try to start the full login daemon if neccessary via
sudo service lightdm start
