this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024

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Weird issue where Cinnamon won’t start properly after doing an update and reboot of Linux Mint 21.3 (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/linuxmint

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After I started up my computer, having updated the last time I used it, going past the log in screen just shows the lock-screen background for a little bit, before a black screen with just a cursor. The Lock Screen still works if I shut the laptop lid or leave the computer enough, but the screen doesn’t seem to turn off properly when shutting the lid and most keyboard shortcuts don’t work, though I can still go to tty.

I tried updating. I tried reinstalling Cinnamon. That didn’t work, but installing lxde and selecting that at login worked, but Cinnamon still doesn’t.

I eventually found out that right clicking the black screen Cinnamon desktop still works, and I can get windows such as the terminal like that, but the windows won’t move or resize.

Probably just going to do a new install.

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[–] muhyb 1 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

You can try to start Cinnamon on TTY to see what goes wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

How would I do that such that I can see an output?

[–] muhyb 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Go to a TTY by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F3. Replace F3 with F4, F5, F6 etc if you are already on that TTY. Once you are in TTY, login with your user and its password. Then run cinnamon --replace. If it runs without any problems, the problem might be related to your display manager. If it doesn't start, you should see the errors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Is prints “Window manager warning: Unsupported session type”.

[–] muhyb 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

This seems to be an error that traced back to Mutter, since Muffin (CInnamon's window manager) is a fork of it I believe they are related. Maybe an upgrade solve this? The post says you are on 21.3, so while on TTY, do an upgrade to see if that works.

sudo apt dist-upgrade

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Didn’t work.

[–] muhyb 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You already tried reinstalling CInnamon but can you try it by purging this time, if you already didn't do it like that?

sudo apt purge cinnamon
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt install cinnamon cinnamon-settings cinnamon-session cinnamon-screensaver

Then reboot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

E: Unable to locate package cinnamon-settings

Did the reinstall with the rest of them after running purge.

Rebooted and got the same result when trying to run Cinnamon.

You already tried reinstalling CInnamon but can you try it by purging this time, if you already didn’t do it like that?

My command last time was sudo apt install --reinstall cinnamon, so this was my first time “purging”.

[–] muhyb 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Purge is used when you want something to be deleted completely, and autoremove is used to clean the rest of the unused dependencies. If those didn't fix the issue, this could be about your user or user's home directory. Though the errors indicate a session problem.

You can try to reset all Cinnamon configuration. dconf reset -f /org/cinnamon/ That will delete everything you changed on Cinnamon so you may want to backup your settings.

Backup dconf dump /org/cinnamon/ > cinnamon-settings-backup

Restore dconf load /org/cinnamon/ < cinnamon-settings-backup

If that still doesn't work, can you try to add a new user to see if that user can login to Cinnamon? sudo add newuser

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Didn’t work. The add command wasn’t found.

Wondering if it might be something to do with my graphics drivers?

[–] muhyb 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh my, so sorry about this. Sometimes I tend to not to write a word I'm thinking when I write and it happened to be a command. -_-

It should be sudo useradd newuser and you also need to attend a password to it so it can login sudo passwd newuser.

Since you can login with LXDE I don't think it's graphics driver related. Maybe changing a display manager would work but I'm not so warm about it. This looks like something low-level went wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Just got round to trying that. This is weird. When I try to login as the new user; this happens:

It just goes to a TTY screen that says [FAILED] Failed to start casper-md5check Verify Live ISO checksums. and then returns to the login screen.

Edit: That same message was shown when I pressed Shud Down, though it did successfully shut down.

[–] muhyb 1 points 1 week ago

That's pretty weird. It's a live ISO error, you shouldn't get something like that.

It's probably not that but if the filesystem is corrupted you can get weird things. Try this: sudo fsck -f /

If still no effect, login to LXDE and find cinnamon config files under ~/.config/cinnamon, not sure about the exact location since I don't use Cinnamon but should be something like that. After finding that, change the name to cinnamon.bak and try login to Cinnamon again. If that's related to configs, you should be able login.

You can also try different display manager, it seems you currently have lightdm. For instance, sddm could be an alternative.

sudo apt install sddm
sudo systemctl stop lightdm
sudo systemctl disable lightdm
sudo systemctl enable sddm

then restart.

If you want to revert this, just sudo systemctl disable sddm and sudo systemctl enable lightdm. You can remove sddm after the experiment.

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