Allow Manual Login on Ubuntu - lightdm Configuration

At times we need to login to our Ubuntu system manually. With manually I mean, by typing in the user name and password instead of clicking on an username and typing in the password. For example, you might want to login to root with Graphical User Interface (GUI) enabled. But if you can't login to root from lightdm, you might need to run several commands. Instead of going the hard way, we will just configure lightdm to let us do that easily.

Let's see how it's done.

To enable manual login on lightdm, start your terminal application and run the following command,

sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-manual.conf

Now add the following lines to this file.

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-show-manual-login=true

Now save the file and restart your computer. Once your computer starts, you will see a new line "Login" on lightdm user list.

Click on it, type in the username and press enter. Then type in the password for that user and press enter. Great! You're logged!