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I'm having problem booting up my ubuntu 16.04.
I started up my computer today and my login screen looked like something out of the 90's (A 256 color looking square box asking for login and password).
After entering my login and password, the wallpaper showed up but nothing else. I tried running the command startx in the tty but I got an error message.
After rebooting a few times, a message box started showing up before login, saying "The system is running in low-graphics mode" and stating that my graphics card could not be detected correctly. After this box, another one shows up asking me what I'd like to do, but I can't get pass this one since I don't have the mouse on screen.
My graphics card is an intel HD 3000.
Does anyone knows how to solve this problem?

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  • Could you please format this in a way that's easier to understand?
    – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
    May 24, 2016 at 23:58
  • Sorry, I don't know how to make it clearer. I got a message box with "System is running on low-graphics mode" and I can't get Ubuntu to start properly. After this message, my desktop wallpaper shows up, but there is nothing else. The entire interface is missing.
    – Andrei
    May 25, 2016 at 1:50

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I just recently had a similar issue, but it was my own fault, I was testing stuff on my workstation, and not in a VM, but that is besides the point.

In the end I booted into a live USB, moved all my files off, and reinstalled. Now that was drastic I know, but I was frustrated by the inability to log in and do anything to fix the problem. That all being said, between when your machine last worked and when this started, what have you installed? Any new hardware, or software?

If hardware can you remove it and try restarting? Hopefully this fixes the issue.

If software, you can get into a terminal only mode by holding the shift key when rebooting, this will take you to your grub loader, and from there you should see something like Ubuntu repair mode, or something that sounds safe. Choose that boot mode, and it will give you a lot of options for trying, but the one I am looking for you to do is the command prompt one, go into that and back out what you last installed, you would do that using this command:

sudo apt-get remove [program-name]

If you installed multiple then try backing out each one, and reboot each time, but if you are dumb like me, you copied and pasted the install commands from a website, and so have no clue what the command was....(I live on the edge).

Anyway if all that does not work, and no-one here smarter than me has a better answer than what I have given, then my answer up front is the answer, login on LIVE USB/CD, get your data off the machine, and re-install.

I hope this helps in some way. Chris

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  • I suffer the same issue about installing new programs. The problem is I don't recall installing anything lately. In fact, it's been a few days since I used this computer. One thing I'm suspecting is that I installed a proprietary graphics card from Intel to test if I could get a better performance for gaming. I think I didn't restored back to the Linux standard graphics driver. An update in the proprietary driver might have unstabilized everything. Is there a way to restore the original kernel through the terminal? I'd like to avoid a drastic measure like formatting.
    – Andrei
    May 25, 2016 at 1:45
  • Well that depends on how anal you are about cleaning up your old kernels. When you follow my instructions about getting grub to load, you should see options to run from other kernels, you could choose the kernel before the latest version at the top.
    – Christopher Angulo-Bertram
    May 25, 2016 at 1:48

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