Over a period of time, the Ubuntu login screen menu can get cluttered with a lot of unwanted sessions. For example, you might have installed Linux Mint on or the Gnome shell on your Ubuntu 11.10 machine that you might wish to get rid off. In this post I will provide you with a quick tip to get rid of these unwanted logon screen menu entries to clean the Ubuntu Login screen drop down menu.

First of all, open Terminal and navigate to /usr/share/xsessions/ by entering the following command:

cd /usr/share/xsessions

Now enter, enter this command to see a list of all installed Ubuntu sessions.

ls

To remove a login session from your Ubuntu logon screen menu, you will require removing or renaming the .desktop file. For example, a session can be removed by renaming this file or by entering its name with this command (e.g., gnome-classic):

sudo mv gnome-classic.desktop gnome-classic.desktop-backup

Alternatively, remove the session completely (instead of renaming it) by entering this command in the Terminal: sudo rm “session name”.desktop. See the below command, which is meant to remove gnome-classic session from the Ubuntu logon screen. To replace other sessions, replace “gnome-classic”, with the name of the respective session name.

sudo rm gnome-classic.desktop