I've an HP personal computer with an integrated graphics card. It worked fine until yesterday.  Now when I try to switch to gdm it just boots up with my usual background and a computer icon in the middle of the screen. I can't do anything; I can't click it and can't log in.  I get the error message:  The system is running in low-graphics mode   I have tried the solution in   I have tried: 1. sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop 2. Verified greeter-session=pantheon-greeter 3. Have tried switching to GDM 4. Have checked I have enough free disk space 5. Installing a new Intel driver from X-Swat repository 6. Reinstalling xserver-xorg    What else can I try?
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Note: This is an attempt to create a canonical question that covers all instances of &quot;low-graphics mode&quot; error that occurs to a user, including but not limited to installation of wrong drivers, incorrect or invalid lightdm greeters, low disk space, incorrect installation of graphics card like ATI and Nvidia, incorrect configuration of xorg.conf file while setting up multiple monitors among others. If you are experiencing the &quot;low-graphics mode&quot; error when trying to login but none of the following answers work for you, please do ask a new question and then update the answers of this canonical question as and when your new question gets answered.   When I try to boot into my computer, I am getting this error:  The system is running in low-graphics mode Your screen, graphics cards, and input device settings could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure these yourself.   How do I fix the failsafe X mode and login into my computer?  Answer index:
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looks like this.  The icons show the desktop background behind them only after hovering over them. It doesn't happen all the time. The desktop became that way upon highlighting it, as you can see. I am currently using  as a stand in for my  while it is being repaired. I sent the Nvidia GPU in for repair because of this black background problem. Originally I had an Intel set up; I bought my Nvidia GPU just before building a new PC entirely. The parts I salvaged from my Intel system build were my PSU and the Nvidia GP I sent in. I never had this problem before I put the Nvidia GPU in my Intel build, but, now even in my AMD build and with an XFX card I still get this glitch/error. Note: I also salvaged my HDD and SSD from my old build. That could be the problem. All I have is Windows and it was a fresh install as of 2 or so months ago. This problem is (from what I can tell) cosmetic, I don't get any harmful system errors stops or glitches, but, I rather like my background so I’d like to have it fixed. As you can see in  I show the parts I salvaged from . Any part not shown in my Intel build was transferred from it to the AMD build. That’s all the information I have, though. Thanks to anyone taking the time to help.
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From the usual Ubuntu login screen, I click on my name, type my password, and press ENTER.  Screen goes black...and stays black.  I cannot get to my desktop.  If I SSH from another computer and run htop, I can see /usr/bin/gnome-shell is eating up 100% of a single core.  Other than gnome-shell, the system is completely idle.  Load average in htop is exactly 1.00.    Earlier today I left it there for over an hour, but no change.  Since then I've also tried rebooting, but same results.  This desktop was previously working fine, not sure what I messed up.  How can I debug what is happening?
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I installed Ubuntu 12.10 and at first when I go to check the system information I used to have (unknown) on the graphic card section, I used the synaptic manager and downloaded the fglrx, after that I restarted my laptop and now I don't have any menus, all of them are gone.  Now I am only using the keyboard shortcuts to use Ubuntu. My graphic card is AMD ATI.  What can I do to bring the menus back?
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I have: ASUS P4V800D-X Intel Pentium 4 HT 2.80GHz 2.5GB RAM 40GB HDD nVidia 9500GT  When I installed nVidia drivers downloaded from nvidia.com website (selected recommended drivers), I simply can't boot into desktop. I pass through purple screen, and then I get black screen with flashing white underscore on left hand side. Keyboard shortcuts are not working and the only way to get to desktop mode is booting into recovery mode (holding shift when booting etc.). In recovery mode I run:  sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*   and that is the only way to get a "normal" desktop environment. I put a quotes on a normal because computer is running slow and I can't set proper resolution.  Also, I've tried to install drivers via ubuntu GUI interface (proprietary, tested drivers), but with no luck.  I am using Ubuntu 14.04
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How do I switch from the default display manager (Lightdm) to the older display manager (GDM)?
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I tried running DxDiag (DirectX diagnostics), and I noticed that my graphics card is set to the onboard one that comes with the Core i5 processor (some Intel HD stuff).  On my computer, I also have a dedicated graphics card (an Nvidia 310). No serious gaming stuff, I know - just for programming.  However, I would still love to know how to switch to that dedicated graphics card instead.  My laptop is an MSI CX720.
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This is my first post in this forum. I am new to Linux, just installed Ubuntu 11.10 on my Sony Vaio VGN-Z12 with two graphic cards Intel and NVidia Geforce 9300 GS.  After the installation the lightdm works on Intel card but with very law display quality. I installed Nvidia driver from the official website as well as this PPA.  sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nvidia-current       Once I installed the driver and run nvidia-xconfig which creates xorg.conf file, the xserver will not start with error "no screen". If I delete the xorg.conf file then I am able to start the xserver normally but with intel display (bad quality)
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I am running Ubuntu Gnome 16.10 (64bit). Gnome-shell version 3.20.4.   When I start my computer, I eventually see GDM3 offering a login prompt, as expected.   After I login, my monitors flash a little (like they're unplugged and then replugged in), and then I am brought to the gnome 3 desktop.   However, if I hit  CTRL + ALT + F1, I am brought back to GDM3, offering a login prompt.   If I then hit CTRL + ALT + F2,  I am brought back to my Gnome 3 desktop.  So it seems like GDM3 continues to run in TTY1 while the desktop runs in TTY2.   Questions   Is this how things are supposed to work? I thought the desktop was supposed to use the same TTY (or whatever you call it) as the display manager.  Am I using more graphical resources by having things setup this way? Is there a way to have GDM3 pass off the display to Gnome Desktop after I login? Is there any advantage do doing #3?
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My ever-growing interest in computers is making me ask deeper questions, that we don't seem to have to ask anymore. Our computers, at boot, as far as I understand it, are in , in which a character can be displayed using the software interrupt  when . We've all seen the famous booting font that always looks the same, regardless of what computer is booting.  So, how on earth do computers output graphics at the lowest level, say, below the OS? And also, surely graphics aren't outputted a pixel at a time using software interrupts, as that sounds very slow?  Is there a standard that defines basic outputting of vertices, polygons, fonts, etc. (below OpenGL for example, which OpenGL might use)? What makes me ask is why OS' can often be fine without official drivers installed; how do they do that?  Apologies if my assumptions are incorrect. I would be very grateful for elaboration on these topics!
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How do I change the default session I get when I log in? I'm on Debian jessie. I tried changing settings on gdm3, tried installing lightdm and following  but it's just not working.  For more specificity, I'm trying to default to gnome-classic instead of gnome. I want to turn on the computer, log in as any arbitrary user, and see gnome-classic, not gnome3 (preferably I'd remove the gnome3 default session, if there's a way to do that).
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We want to set up a 3 screens with an onboard intel graphics adapter and an nvidia card.  Both cards are recognized in lspci   01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 210] (rev a2) 00:02.0 Display controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)   And bascially work: If I switch to the console, I see output on the Intel card, X is only running on the Nvidia card.  But when I type xrandr | grep conn I get only one connected port:   DVI-I-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DVI-I-1 connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 518mm x 324mm HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)   I am on Ubuntu 12.10 (and XFCE) and installed the proprietary nvidia driver.  I was assuming that X maybe has a problem to autodetect both cards, so I thought the following xorg.conf could help:   Section "ServerLayout"     Identifier     "Layout0"     Screen      0  "Screen0"     Screen      1  "Screen1"     InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"     InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer" EndSection  Section "Files" EndSection  Section "InputDevice"     # generated from default     Identifier     "Mouse0"     Driver         "mouse"     Option         "Protocol" "auto"     Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"     Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"     Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection  Section "InputDevice"     # generated from default     Identifier     "Keyboard0"     Driver         "kbd" EndSection  Section "Monitor"     Identifier     "Monitor0"     VendorName     "Unknown"     ModelName      "Unknown"     HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0     VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0     Option         "DPMS" EndSection  Section "Device"     Identifier     "Device0"     Driver         "nvidia"     VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"     BoardName      "GeForce 210" EndSection  Section "Screen"     Identifier     "Screen0"     Device         "Device0"     Monitor        "Monitor0"     DefaultDepth    24     SubSection     "Display"         Depth       24     EndSubSection EndSection   Section "Monitor"     Identifier     "Monitor1"     VendorName     "Unknown"     ModelName      "Unknown"     HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0     VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0     Option         "DPMS" EndSection  Section "Device"     Identifier     "Device1"     Driver         "intel"     VendorName     "Intel"     BoardName      "Internal Intel Graphics" EndSection  Section "Screen"     Identifier     "Screen1"     Device         "Device1"     Monitor        "Monitor1"     DefaultDepth    24     SubSection     "Display"         Depth       24     EndSubSection EndSection   But it is still not working.   Is this generally possible to use two different drivers in X ? Is it necessary to create an xorg.conf manually then? (because Ubuntu 12.10 normally works without the xorg.conf) Are there any errors in my xorg.conf?
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I am trying to change some gconf settings in Ubuntu 12.10. I would like to change the lightdm greeter background.  I have discovered that while logged in to unity as a user while running X server, I am able to do this with:  sudo xhost +SI:localuser:lightdm gsettings set com.canonical.unity-greeter background "'/usr/share/backgrounds/micros-background.png'"   The problem is that this requires me to login as a user under X. So that entire window manager needs to be running. But I want to use chroot to change these settings without any X server running. I just want to mount the partitions and change gsettings without having the full window manager running.  Is there a way to directly change gsettings without being logged into X and Unity?  Or alternatively... is there a way to bring up the X server and Unity in the background so that I can make the changes without having a full windowed display come up on my monitor?
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After upgrading from 12.04 to 14.04 I could log in to my X session (albeit with really low graphics). While trying to fix the graphics, I managed to break the X session.  Now, after typing my password in the unity-greeter, the items disappear and I can only see the desktop background and the pointer. This happens for every user. I can still log in in tty's. How can I solve this?  Also, I cannot seem to be able to install nvidia-current as it tries to install nvidia-304 and it depends on old video-abi libraries. Is there a way to tell the package manager that nvidia-current should use a newer version?
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I recently switched from terminal prompt login (getty?) to GNOME Display Manager. It  that GDM always reads .profile, regardless of user's setting of login shell (Zsh in my case). Why is that? I assume it's hardcoded in , but I can't find. Why did they do that? Does the software depends on some functionality of Bourne shell?  This is not very good if I want to use both GDM and getty (as fallback), because I then need to keep my .profile and .zprofile in sync. I'm not so confident about sourcing .profile in .zprofile (I met some compatibility issues before, when I tried to source .bashrc in .zshrc). I think Bash called as /bin/sh behaves in POSIX mode, but I'm not sure whether it avoids all the pitfalls.  In case it matters, I'm on latest Arch Linux, running GNOME with Wayland (so there should not be any Xsession script involved).
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I connected an external screen to my laptop, but my desktop didn't automagically extend to it, as it used to do about a year ago (older version of Ubuntu).  I went to the display settings. The screen was listed there (correct resolution, brand name, etc.). But when i put the switch on 'on' and click 'apply', i get this error:   Failed to apply configuration: %s  GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such interface `org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.XRANDR_2' on object at path /org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/XRANDR   It's been like this for a few months now, but i'd really like to be able to use an external screen/beamer again.  Any ideas?  Thanks.
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I use Blender with my iMac Late 2012 and I have the graphics card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M. In the internet it says, that this graphics card has CUDA but however I cannot change the 'Compute Device' in my User Preferences. Anyone an idea?