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I am new to Ubuntu, and I am working on a Mac. The Ubuntu installation was done by someone else. I logged in with the user name and password, but I'm not sure what next to do in the terminal to get to the graphical interface. Could someone assist or point me in a direction where I can get useful guidelines? I have done research, but nothing I found helped me.

When I tried to start the lightdm greeter, I got the following message:

lightdm.service not found  

Update: My understanding is that Ubuntu Server is installed.

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    What has been installed? What are you trying to get? Maybe your installation does not have a GUI.
    – Pilot6
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:09
  • Possible duplicate of askubuntu.com/questions/2093/… Feb 12, 2018 at 20:33
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    @DavidFoerster This question is not a duplicate of askubuntu.com/questions/2093/… because the OP is not asking how to install a GUI on Ubuntu Server. Instead he's asking how to login in a situation in which he doesn't know that no GUI is installed by default in Ubuntu Server.
    – karel
    Feb 13, 2018 at 14:37

2 Answers 2

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Ubuntu Server does not include a graphical user interface by default. If you are connected to the system console you will see a screen similar to the following:

enter image description here

To login to Ubuntu Server from the above screen:

  1. At the login: prompt type your username and press Enter.

  2. At the Password: prompt type your user password and press Enter.


To install the default Ubuntu desktop environment (Unity) in Ubuntu Server run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo reboot

These commands will also install the LightDM greeter so that you can login to the Ubuntu desktop environment from a nice login screen.

If you logged in at the system console, one of the following two commands will bring up a GUI login screen to login to the Ubuntu desktop environment.

sudo systemctl start graphical.target # Ubuntu 15.04 and later

or

sudo service lightdm start # Ubuntu 12.04/14.04 
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    The response was unit lighted.service not found, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-36-generic x86_64 (want to get all the information about what was instal) what should be done next?
    – S.Coertzen
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:17
  • Did you mean lightdm.service not found ?
    – karel
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:22
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    Yes I did my apologies for the mistake
    – S.Coertzen
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:22
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    My understanding is that Ubuntu server is installed.
    – S.Coertzen
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:32
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    On systemd systems (15.04+), you should do sudo systemctl start graphical.target instead of only launching lightdm, I think.
    – Byte Commander
    Sep 29, 2016 at 9:49
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I am also very new to Ubuntu so you can try the following things, which solved a similar problem for me:

  1. Try ctrl+alt+f1 (try all from f1 to f11), I just got stuck yesterday on a virtual machine and realized that there is more than 1 terminal in Ubuntu

  2. You can also try the command

    startx
    

This will show if you have ubuntu-desktop environment installed.

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  • I am not connected to the internet, because I do not know how to connect through the terminal, I did read about how to connect through wifi bit I could not get it to work, if this is any useful I am working on a Mac if something is different, of what it could be on other OS
    – S.Coertzen
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:31
  • Try this command: dpkg -l ubuntu-desktop . It will tell you if you have the desktop ui installed Sep 28, 2016 at 13:37
  • dpkg-query: no packages found matching ubuntu-desktop (reply i received)
    – S.Coertzen
    Sep 28, 2016 at 13:43
  • You dont have the UI components installed I think, maybe just wait for more experienced users to help in installing it, just also add the output of the following command: lsb_release -a (It will help in understanding the version of Ubuntu you are running) Sep 28, 2016 at 13:48

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