Unity Desktop incomplete when launching manually using 'startx $(which unity)'

This is a follow-up question to 15.10: 'startx $(which unity)' fails when booting to console.

I finally managed to load the Unity Desktop after having booted into text-mode. But the desktop I get is still not usable. It has a screen resolution of 800x600 and all indicators are missing, the panel is completely empty. Also I can't change the settings (e.g. the display resolution), which results in an error like this:

What is happening here? When I boot directly into the graphical desktop environment, there are zero problems. What am I missing when booting to console and starting the desktop manually?

I currently do that by executing startx $(which unity).

Please help me to be able to successfully start the Unity desktop manually from a pure console.

Solution 1:

You could follow the chain of targets from the point you stopped at and manually load the graphical target as if you didn't stop at the multi-user target at all:

sudo systemctl start graphical.target

That will handle everything correctly.

But bear in mind that this will start LightDM, which will in turn start Unity upon login, and not Unity directly.

To leave the graphical desktop again in favor of the console, load the multi-user.target:

sudo chvt 1 && sudo systemctl start multi-user.target

The sudo chvt 1 additionally switches back from TTY7 (GUI) to TTY1 (console), because otherwise you would stay on a black screen.