Desktop mysteriously replaced with black void [solved]

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dragon-dragon_dragon

Desktop mysteriously replaced with black void [solved]

Post by dragon-dragon_dragon »

Everything has been working fine for me and my laptop since Linux Mint 14 (I'm now on LM15). So... a couple days ago I was minding my own business ejecting a USB drive and I suffer a hard freeze; nothing worked, the mouse didn't even move, and the screen was still up. I gave it some time to think, then eventually held the power button to reboot. Upon reboot, MY DESKTOP VANISHED!!! It was just a black void! Scary! The start menu was still there, but the actual desktop background was gone, there were no icons at all, and right click/ left click had no effect and the space that once was my desktop.

So I tried the obvious stuff, apt-get dist-upgrade, created a new user and checked if it had a desktop, deleted my ~/.config file, blah, blah, and didn't get any results. So finally I copied all my files to a portable drive and reinstalled LM15 cinnamon fresh.

But just a few seconds ago I clicked the eject button to eject my USB drive (I had just copied some files on to it and patiently waited for the light to stop blinking) and... I suffered another hard freeze. Upon reboot, my desktop has once again vanished.

Anyone have any ideas? What process is even in charge of "being the desktop" anyway? Maybe I can just restart it? Maybe I can install a new one? It's so weird that this happened again, after a USB drive eject related hard freeze.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
dragon-dragon_dragon

Re: Desktop mysteriously replaced with black void

Post by dragon-dragon_dragon »

Update: I'm finding that my laptop crashes when trying to test the memory... probably the cause for this weirdness...

Update: Actually my l1 cache is showing as 032kb instead of 256kb which might indicate some other kind of h/w problem. After attempting to run memtest and swapping ram, I encountered the same crashes and error messages (the memtest from grub gave an "error: too small lower memory...") instead of just rebooting as was the result of attempting a memtest from the LM15 boot disk.

Update: nvm this post, it's night h/w it seems those were bugs in code, my system can't run those two memory tests, Hiren's boot CD passed for a while though... Any advice/ input would be helpful.
dragon-dragon_dragon

Re: Desktop mysteriously replaced with black void

Post by dragon-dragon_dragon »

I've been doing some playing around and I can install xfce and... well, it looks a lot lamer than Cinnamon, there seems to be no menu bar, but there's a flexbar??? So maybe that's how XFCE is meant to be played, idk, but the point is, I have a desktop in that mode, but all the icons look really really dated, like they pirated the icons from window 3.11. I'm usually supportive of piracy, but in this case it's a complete disaster and they should give those icons right back to 1993!

After further fiddling, I installed `sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback` and fired that up, and low&B-hold there's no desktop in that session! I'm somewhat on to somthing, but I still haven't gathered enough information to devise a workaround yet.
dragon-dragon_dragon

Re: Desktop mysteriously replaced with black void

Post by dragon-dragon_dragon »

I've finally discovered something. When booting up, the desktop doesn't load, but after everything is booted up, you can click the menu button on Cinnamon and then click the folder icon on the left hand side. Then as expected, nemo will pop open. But as an added bonus, the desktop will mysteriously appear and everything will be like it was before this weirdness began occurring!
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