Linux Mint Forums

Hi everyone, this is my first post. I've searched Google and this forum pretty in-depth and didn't see any solutions to this problem, so I'm hoping a new thread will do the trick. Thanks in advance for anyone that can help out a Linux newbie.

So, a few hours ago I used Update Manager to update what I thought were just a few incidental packages. When I restarted about an hour ago, though, my session opened in Gnome instead of Cinnamon. The only thing I can think of is that one of those updates must have triggered something that's making it impossible for Cinnamon to load (maybe Nvidia driver or X-related problems?). I've tried making a new profile, but that doesn't make any difference. I've tried rolling back a number of the updated drivers that looked suspect (using the "Force Version" option in Synaptic), but that hasn't made any difference, either. Cinnamon is definitely installed, as I can go to its settings page and tweak things (even though that doesn't make any difference). If I try to run it from a Terminal, I just get kicked back to the logon screen, oddly enough.

Not a huge fan of the Gnome environment, and was considering wiping my partitions and reinstalling Mint, but it took me a good while (in my newb-ness) to track down and install a lot of drivers and other odds and ends to get my ancient laptop to work with Mint in the first place, and I'd like to avoid having to do that again, if possible. I'm hoping maybe there's just some stupid simple fix that I don't know about or something...I'd love to find out that I'm just missing something obvious.

If it'll help at all, I can type up my update history from the last few hours...

Thanks again for any help!

I'm not familiar with the MDM Login Manager, but when you log in there should be some sort of box or button you can click to choose what desktop environment to load.

proxima_centauri wrote:I'm not familiar with the MDM Login Manager, but when you log in there should be some sort of box or button you can click to choose what desktop environment to load.

There is, but it doesn't matter what option I choose (Cinnamon, Gnome, or "Run Xclient script), it still only loads Gnome. I even once got it to give me a "Cinnamon 2D" option (though I don't know how, exactly), and that didn't even work. I've gone through System Administration > Login Window and set the default environment to Cinnamon and Cinnamon 2D, and it still only boots to Gnome. That's what's making me think it might be a display driver issue and I'm defaulting to the "fallback" (something I read about a bit on a few other forum posts, but honestly don't really understand that well).

FWIW, I've also tried upgrading Cinnamon from 1.4 to the new 1.6, and then rolling back to 1.4. Neither one made any difference. I haven't tried uninstalling Cinnamon completely and reinstalling, though. Maybe I'll try that now...

EDIT: Okay, that didn't work, either.

If I am understanding correctly, this is the same issue I am having which led me to this forum. I have been interested in trying Linux Mint for some time now and loaded it up in VirtualBox to give it a spin. I became frustrated when it appeared that the Cinnamon ISO looked suspiciously like MATE. I checked many screenshots and youtube videos and eventually became convinced there must be some bug, and came here to look for it. I believe I am having the same issue: I attempt to load cinnamon, selecting it from login screen even, but am taken to what appears to be MATE from the screenshots I've seen. Don't get me wrong, it's nice, but Cinnamon has at least one key feature I like to have: desktop search.

Hi. I managed to resolve this by going into VirtualBox settings and enabling 3D and 2D accelleration and rebooting the VBox instance and selecting Cinnamon from the GDM menu.

I finally managed to fix mine by learning about and then running sgfxi. Thanks for the help, though.