After restarting my desktop (Ubuntu Mate 20.04) I cannot log in. I enter my password and it displays the message "Failed to start session" above the password text entry box. I don't know how to recover from this, and any help will be sincerely appreciated.
More Info: When I click the Accessibility icon in the top panel of the login screen, and select "Onscreen keyboard", nothing happens. One of the last things I did before this problem appeared was to use the Software app to remove what I believed were programs I don't need. One of those was the "Onboard" app, as well as the "Onboard Settings" app.
Is it possible that the login screen needs those apps installed in order to start a session? (If so, that may be a bug.) If that is the problem, then how do I reinstall those two apps if I cannot login?
Thanks,
Dave H.
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Welcome @DaveHighland to our community!
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I think it's fixed. Here's what happened:
From the login screen, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to the command line and tried reinstalling the Mate desktop:
sudo apt reinstall mate-desktop
sudo reboot
That didn't work. So I searched with apt, comparing results on another computer, and determined that several packages were missing:
sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment
sudo apt install mate-tweak
sudo apt install mate-indicator-applet
sudo apt install mate-indicator-applet-common
sjudo reboot
And that worked. I have no idea how those packages went missing.
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That last command should be sudo reboot but this worked completely, thank you so much
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Hi, @vikramb and welcome to the Ubuntu MATE Community!
You’re most welcome.
I’d like to edit the solution to fix that sjudo typo, but I don’t see how to do that. The original post has a pencil icon at the top line to edit the original post, but the solution post has no such icon. Ideas, anyone?