Ubuntu 14.10: Remove Guest Session, White Dots From Login Screen

Last updated: September 28, 2014

remove white dots, guest session

This is a quick tutorial that shows you how to remove the Guest session and the white dots from Unity’s login screen in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic.

1. To remove the Guest session:

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and hit enter:

sudo gedit /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-ubuntu.conf

Type in your user password when it asks. Note that there’s no visual feed back when typing password.

As the picture shows, when the editor opens, add a new line into the end and save the file

allow-guest=false

That’s it. You won’t see the Guest next time Ubuntu boots up.

2. To Remove white dots:

There is a graphical tool dconf-editor which provides options to change the login screen background and remove the white dots (draw grid).

a.) To install dconf-editor, click the link below to bring up Ubuntu Software Center and click the install button:

b.) To configure Unity login screen, you need the lightdm user privilege to launcher dconf-editor. To do so:

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. When it opens, run commands to get root privilege:

sudo -i

Type in your user password when it asks.

Allow user lightdm to create a connection to the X server:

xhost +SI:localuser:lightdm

Switch to user lightdm in this terminal window:

su lightdm -s /bin/bash

Finally start dconf-editor:

dconf-editor

c.) When the dconf-editor opens, navigate to com –> canonical –> unity-greeter in left. Then disable the value for both draw-grid and draw-user-backgrounds.

Done. You’ll see the changes in next boot.

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I'm a freelance blogger who started using Ubuntu in 2007 and wishes to share my experiences and some useful tips with Ubuntu beginners and lovers. Please comment to let me know if the tutorial is outdated! And, notify me if you find any typo/grammar/language mistakes. English is not my native language. Contact me via ubuntuhandbook1@gmail.com Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/ubuntuhandbook1

2 responses to Ubuntu 14.10: Remove Guest Session, White Dots From Login Screen

  1. Hi Jim, thank you for the information. Can you tell me how to add a root user in the kde 5 login screen in ubuntu server 14.10?

  2. thanks Jim, still very useful information in 1604, been a while since ive used advanced unix user permissions. archiving this text data for future reference
    rock on