Where can I find Unity's log files?

Question

Since I upgraded to Oneiric, the top left Unity menu button is missing, fonts look a bit weird (font size changed) and the login screen looks like the one from Natty, except with a GTK1-like gray theme. Apart from that, everything (e.g. the Unity launcher bar) looks kind of okay. I have no idea how to pinpoint the problem, are there any log files I should check? Xorg.0.log doesn't contain any errors.

I have a Lenovo T410 with a nvidia graphics card and the proprietary driver is installed. Hardware acceleration works fine.

Solution 1

While most of the things you describe probably won't be listed in log files, you may find some errors relating to the login screen in the lightdm logs. They can be found in /var/log/lightdm/

Solution 2

You can find the log output from Unity in ~/.xsession-errors, however that will not help.

There's no Unity menu button on the top panel any more; it was moved into the launcher. Move your mouse to the leftmost edge of the screen to see it.

The weird fonts are probably caused by new default settings. Also, you can't change them: the options are gone from the control center. You can probably change them if you fiddle with dconf-editor.

Broken login screen? Sounds like you still have gdm instead of lightdm. Can you check? (Type pidof lightdm in a terminal, if you get no output, then it's not running; if you see a number, then it's running. Same with pidof gdm.) There are log files in /var/log/dist-upgrade that might shed some light and explain why you didn't get lightdm -- did you use the Update Manager to upgrade to Oneiric, or did you do something unsupported like sudo apt-get dist-upgrade?

Comments

[hannes]

Looking for the logfiles I noticed, that the updater didn't install or activate lightdm. I did that manually and it worked. Thanks!