Hello, rderosier.
I'm so new to Linux that I don't even know how to change it
Well, you were given the details in my previous reply.
karlchen wrote:In order to activate all 5 categories in minUpdate, launch mintUpdate and go to Edit => Preferences => tab "Levels" and activate all 5 levels. Confirm. mintUpdate will refresh the list of available updates.
don't need to for my purposes
Well, it is your decision to stay with the default values or to change them.
Whether or not it makes sense to change is pretty unrelated to being a newbie or an expert.
Bugs do not care whether a user is a newbie or an expert. They hit you when the conditions which trigger them match your system.
If you are hit by a bug which can only be fixed by installing updates which the Mint makers consider "risky to system stability", then it will be necessary to do so, newbie or expert.
Yet, at this point in time, it has not been determined whether such a bug is the root cause or not.
Also, I might note that I did use Menu->Preferences->Additional Drivers to install the
recommended current version of the Nvidia driver when I first installed Mate.
Confirmed. It can be told from the output of "inxi -Fx" as well:
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA G92 [GeForce 8800 GT] bus-ID: 02:00.0
X.Org: 1.11.3 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: nouveau,vesa,fbdev) Resolution: 1600x1024@51.0hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce 8800 GT/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 295.40 Direct Rendering: Yes
Further, I've been running Mate for a few months now, and I've never had this problem.
I see.
Mate is based on the old Gnome 2. The Gnome guys stopped developping Gnome 2 and replaced it by Gnome 3. The Mate makers took Gnome 2 and continued developping Gnome 2 under the new name of "Mate".
Cinnamon is based on Gnome 3. Clem created a fork of Gnome 3 and called it "Cinnamon".
As they use a different software bases, Cinnamon and Mate are not totally unlikely to exhibit different behaviour for technical reasons:
They may both run fine on a given system.
Mate may run fine, but Cinnamon may give you problems (like in your case) or vice versa.
What I realized now that you mentioned being a Mac guy is the fact that you are running Mint 13 x64 on an Apple machine.
Machine: System: Apple product: MacPro3 1 version: 1.0
Mobo: Apple model: Mac-F42C88C8 version: Proto1 Bios: Apple version: MP31.88Z.006C.B05.0802291410 date: 02/29/08
CPU(s): 2 Quad core Intel Xeon CPU E5462s (-HT-MCP-SMP-) cache: 12288 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 44688.2
Clock Speeds: 1: 2400.00 MHz 2: 2400.00 MHz 3: 2400.00 MHz 4: 2400.00 MHz 5: 2400.00 MHz 6: 2400.00 MHz 7: 2400.00 MHz 8: 2400.00 MHz
I had been focussing too much on the Nvidia graphics card and the genuine Nvidia driver software.
As a consequence I will extend my Google search correspondingly. This simply means I will try to find something useful about running Cinnamon on Apple machines, not just about the Nvidia card GT8800.
As it is relevant for the problem, can you bothered to post the output of the commands
please. This will tell us whether you are still using the original mdm and cinnamon versions that came with Mint 13 x64 in May 2012, or whether you are already running the current versions which were backported from Mint 14 to Mint 13 lately.
Kind regards,
Karl
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P.S.: Sorry for being overly verbose maybe and posting such a long reply.