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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.

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  • also, this answer didn't help.
    – yuvi
    Oct 8, 2014 at 15:24
  • I just install xubuntu-desktop and it runs fine. Clearly a problem with unity
    – yuvi
    Oct 8, 2014 at 15:53
  • No, it is not a problem with Unity - it is your inexperience with Linux showing completely with the list of items you said you did. You should not be installing graphics drivers from random web-sites, you should stick to what is in the Ubuntu repositories for a reason: they are tested and they won't (often) break your system like installing from upstream will. Also, wait for the next kernel update. Once that happens expect your Xfce desktop to break too. Because you aren't using Ubuntu-provided AMD/Intel drivers and likely didn't hook them in with DKMS so anew kernel won't find the modules
    – headkase
    Oct 8, 2014 at 16:24
  • Also, what is /usr/lib doing inside of /home? Your file-system is our of whack too if that is the case.
    – headkase
    Oct 8, 2014 at 16:30
  • 1
    @Bill official sites for Intel and amd are hardly "random websites". The drivers provided by the repositories are outdated and don't allow me to run some games through steam (game that run very well on Windows on the same computer)
    – yuvi
    Oct 8, 2014 at 16:52

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