Changing the default session in Elementary OS
2014-01-10
I installed Elementary OS a few months ago, but moved back to Ubuntu for some reason or another. A couple days ago I decided to give Elementary OS another try. Well, tonight I finally started missing openbox too much and decided to install it and give up on Elementary's default desktop manager. Once I installed openbox, I logged out and noticed that the greeter didn't have a way to change the session. A bit of googling came up with this:
"The desktop manager that ships with Luna is a highly modified version of lightdm. Some of the configuration options that might appear in a lightdm.conf file are not available. You will have to use another desktop manager in order to select different desktop environments or disable the guest account, among other things."
That's a funky thing to do... well I messed around and figured it out, but first try rebooting after installing another desktop environment or window manager -- I'm not sure if that would've worked alone or what I did actually fixed it. If rebooting doesn't work, try this:
- Log out
- Hit ctrl+alt+F1 to go to a tty prompt
- enter
sudo killall lightdm - enter
sudo lightdm
Now, you should see a small gear icon above the password entry on the greeter. With that you can change which session to log in to.
Now that I think about it, it was probably just the reboot and that moderator didn't know what he was talking about.