How To Install lightdm on Ubuntu

Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )

2 minutes • 374 words

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install lightdm on Ubuntu.

What is `lightdm`

lightdm is:

LightDM is a X display manager that:

Has a lightweight codebase
Is standards compliant (PAM, ConsoleKit, etc)
Has a well defined interface between the server and user interface
Cross-desktop (greeters can be written in any toolkit)

There are three methods to install lightdm on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install lightdm Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install lightdm using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install lightdm

Install lightdm Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install lightdm using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install lightdm

Install lightdm Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install lightdm using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install lightdm

How To Uninstall lightdm on Ubuntu

To uninstall only the lightdm package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove lightdm

Uninstall lightdm And Its Dependencies

To uninstall lightdm and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove lightdm

Remove lightdm Configurations and Data

To remove lightdm configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge lightdm

Remove lightdm configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove lightdm configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge lightdm

Dependencies

lightdm have the following dependencies:

References

lightdm website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install lightdm package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.