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I'm really a computer novice so I apologize in advance. I have an old Dell Latitude that I wiped clean and installed 14.04. I thought it would install just like the older version has on my desktop. But after the installation, I receive the login prompts just in the terminal mode. I figured out the easy part to enter my login name and password, but that is about it. The next prompt lists "username@hostname:~$" and I have no idea what to do next. I thought I would get regular login page (like in Windows) and have a desktop. If anyone can help me through this process of what type of code(s) I need to enter next to get this thing up and running that would be appreciated.

(p.s. I also really wanted to install the 12. version but just got the DVD now). So if that version is easier to use than the 14 version, please advise the best way to install that over the current version.

Thank you so much.

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    Something went wrong somewhere. Did you install the desktop version of Ubuntu or download the server version by mistake?
    – user68186
    Oct 14, 2014 at 17:05

2 Answers 2

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Yes, you should have a regular login page.

What happen is you type

startx

???

And do you have lightdm installed? Use the following command to check:

dpkg -l | grep -i lightdm

you should have a line that looklikes this:

ii  lightdm                                               1.10.1-0ubuntu1                                        amd64        Display Manager
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  • Hi. I typed startx and this is what I got "The program 'startx' is currently not installed. You can installit by typing: sudo apt-get intall xinit. I typed that instruction and it came up: Oct 14, 2014 at 17:38
  • ... it came up as "reading package lists... Done... Building dependency tree... reading state information... done... E: Unable to locate package xinit Oct 14, 2014 at 17:39
  • it came back as "unrecognized service". Oct 14, 2014 at 17:48
  • it came back as error: unknown option -1 Oct 14, 2014 at 17:56
  • I have tried to reinstall from the downloaded disk several times over the past 2 days. I always come up with the same results on the way it looks. I'm wondering if somehow something was removed from the laptop that is necessary that I just don't know of. And now just before coming on this forum when I tried to install with the previous 12 version, I came up with a grub error and had to go back to installing 14. Oct 14, 2014 at 17:58
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After you have logged in in terminal mode type:

sudo service lightdm start  

and press Enter to bring up your default login screen and then login to your Ubuntu desktop environment as usual.

Ubuntu 14.04 is easier to use than Ubuntu 12.04 in many ways, assuming that everything is working properly. If Ubuntu 12.04 has any advantage compared to Ubuntu 14.04, it is that the systems requirements for Ubuntu 12.04 are less than for Ubuntu 14.04, so it may run better than Ubuntu 14.04 on older hardware. However if Ubuntu 12.04 would run better than Ubuntu 14.04 on older hardware then so would Xubuntu 14.04, and you would also get all the upgraded packages.

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  • I can't even get into how to check the hardware on my laptop now. As I can only get into this terminal code screen. (ps: the laptop used to have windows xp on it until I installed from the ubuntu installation disk. I know it had 4 GB RAM. And I was told to use the 64bit download Oct 14, 2014 at 18:02
  • Maybe you have a 32-bit CPU, so you should have installed Ubuntu 32-bit. Unlike with Windows, a 32-bit CPU can use all 4GB of RAM in Ubuntu. Login at your terminal prompt and comment about the results of running the command uname -p which prints the processor type or "unknown" if the processor type is unknown.
    – karel
    Oct 14, 2014 at 18:34
  • Thanks. I'll try that as well. Have to wait until tonight in order to download another version from a different computer. (currently I'm on my work computer to talk to everyone here and can't do any type of downloading on it) Oct 14, 2014 at 18:44
  • And thanks to you and everyone helping me on this. I feel really stupid because I don't really understand all the coding and trying to learn Oct 14, 2014 at 18:45
  • Run the uname -p command before you download anything that you might not need. Also there are other possible solutions that can be done from the terminal, so if the first suggestion doesn't work, you can try something else. Ubuntu Server is often run completely from the terminal, and you can also do almost everything from the terminal in Ubuntu Desktop.
    – karel
    Oct 14, 2014 at 18:47

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