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While upgrading to 14.04 using sudo do-release-upgrade my network connection was interrupted and several packages failed to upgrade.

Running do-release-upgrade again reported No new releases found but apt-get listed many packages "kept back", so it seemed the system was in an intermediate state. I ran apt-get dist-upgrade which installed those packages again, then apt-get autoremove after which apt seemed happy.

However, after restarting I cannot log in at the GUI prompt. After entering my password the error "Failed to start session" appears in red. I am still able to log in from the command prompt, but I don't know what to do to solve or debug the GUI log in failure.

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    @Elliott, try Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a shell login prompt. Then you use Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get back to the GUI.
    – Ian Mackinnon
    Apr 21, 2014 at 11:01
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    This worked for me sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-session
    – Aravinda
    May 2, 2015 at 3:14

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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After issuing the following command I was able to log in again:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

I had previously removed update-notifier which caused some other packages to be removed, some of which it seems were necessary to successfully perform the distribution upgrade.

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    running this command gave me a message to run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' and this got me back on track thanks
    – Aaron Williams
    Oct 8, 2014 at 0:09
  • Still doesn't work
    – Nathan B
    Feb 25, 2022 at 19:59
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For me the answer was in my /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf - I'd been running my 12.04 LTS in ubuntu-2d mode, had to revert back to just ubuntu and that fixed the issue

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Run a 

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

to reconfigure your packages. Hopefully it will work. (At least for me it worked with several issued)

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