Beautiful cinnamon menu is gone

[nieuwenj]

Hello,

was used to Ubuntu 10.04 until this week-end with the arrival of a new Asus N76Vz laptop. Install went fine. Tried to install the NVidia drivers. Big failure, got a 640x480 ugly desktop. Managed to come back to a normal resolution by removing the xorg.conf and restarting.

But now, my original Cinnamon menu is gone. And I liked it very much for 3 days ! I'm now back with the typical gnome menu I was used to in Ubuntu. I do chose the Cinnamon session but in sysinfo, I get :
Desktop Environment : unknown ( window manager : metacity ).

How can I get Cinnamon back ?

Thanks !

nieuwenj

PS : I already apt-get purge/install cinnamon without effect

[zerozero]

Hi, welcome to the forums and sorry to hear that you're having problems

can you open a terminal and give us the output of

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inxi -Gx

[nieuwenj]

Hi & thanks for your reply. Interesting command indeed :

nieuwenj@coconut ~ $ inxi -Gx
Graphics: Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0
Card-2: NVIDIA GK107 [GeForce GT 650M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) FAILED: nvidia,nouveau,intel Resolution: 1920x1080@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: N/A GLX Version: N/A Direct Rendering: N/A

so seems my nvidia and the "nouveau" ( which was used before I installed the NVidia drivers ) fail....

[zerozero]

yes, let's go through the output

Graphics: Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0
Card-2: NVIDIA GK107 [GeForce GT 650M] bus-ID: 01:00.0

you have a 2 gpu setup: an intel integrated and a nvidia discrete: this means troubles there's only one reliable way to make this setup work (for now) >> bumblebee

installing the nvidia drivers any other way results in this

GLX Renderer: N/A GLX Version: N/A Direct Rendering: N/A

meaning you don't have direct rendering and any openGL intensive DE like cinnamon (or unity or gnome-shell) will break and send you back to a fallback mode.
if the same happened in mate or xfce you'll not notice great difference (interface-wise but the problem would still be there)

now, note the following, bumblebee will work fine but it will fail if you have traces of previous nvidia installations; the easiest way (if this is a fresh install and there is not much to loose) is start afresh.

[nieuwenj]

Ok, I can see that dual graphics seems difficult at this time. Reinstalling is a problem as this is a laptop for work & I already installed a dozen tools, some of which being already customized. Furthermore, restoring all the files I need from the old laptop is also time consuming.

Bubblebee seems useful only if I want to play games or use graphics intensive apps, which is not what I want to do.

The only thing I want now is to return to the previous situation where I used the "nouveau" driver and was running Cinnamon. So I guess my question is : how do I tell MInt that ?

I removed all the nvidia packages but I still see this :

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nieuwenj@coconut ~ $ modprobe -l |grep nvi
kernel/drivers/video/nvidia/nvidiafb.ko
kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/nvidia/forcedeth.ko
kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko


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nieuwenj@coconut /var/log $ grep -i nvid Xorg.0.log
[     3.792] (II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
[     3.792] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module  310.32  Mon Jan 14 14:59:59 PST 2013
[     3.825] (EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)


Isn't there a logfile somewhere that would tell me why Cinnamon fails to start ?

Or maybe the "hardcore" way of making sure Nvidia files are gone before installing bumblebee ?

Thanks very much for your help & sorry to be a pain

nieuwenj

PS : I do have a strong Unix background, not afraid of cli but quite shocked that I can be in such a situation 20 years after installing my first "Slackware" :=)

[nieuwenj]

Sorry to insist but does somebody have an idea ?

Thanks !

nieuwenj

[zerozero]

sorry for the delay
the question here is that you need bumblebee to make your dual gpu work properly;
and it will use the intel card by default and only the nvidia when you so define with the switch "optirun <appname>"

the question here is that bumblebee will fail if there's any trace of previous nvidia installations (probably you'll have also to remove xorg.conf > i know i had when i changed from nvidia to intel [not in a dual gpu setup but direct swap])

[Talegolas]

I had the same issue running a Lenovo thinkpad. It has dual video, Intel integrated chip and an nvidia discrete.
I was looking for a solution without really knowing what the problem was. I always thought i was messing up the nvidia driver installation because cinamon was going away, and until i found this post I realized that the the Intel driver was the one being loaded for some reason!.

I don't get why the nouveau driver does load instead of intel after the initial mint installation, but as soon as loading the nvidia driver (using apt-get) it fails to use it. Makes no sense whatsoever.. (if someone can shed some light to this)

anyway, the way i just "fixed" it was not in Mint, but in the Laptop BIOS. I have an option to use the nvidia optium wihch only supports windows 7 to detect if it should run the Intel card (to save energy) or if it should switch to Nvidia (for when a game requires HW acceleration i guess). The point is that i can switch it to ALWAYS use the nvidia card.. the discrete card.. once i changed that and rebooted back to Mint, the ever so gorgeous Cinamon came back

Interestingly enough, the nvidia driver does fail loading it seems..unless i am reading the following message incorrectly:

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$ inxi -Gx
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GF119 [Quadro NVS 4200M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) FAILED: nvidia Resolution: 1600x900@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: NVS 4200M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.2.0 NVIDIA 304.43 Direct Rendering: Yes


anyone care to comment?
Cheers!

[zerozero]

if you have an option in the bios to disable one of the gpus good (not all the bios have that option afaik)

there's no problem with the drivers, look at this part of the output

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GLX Renderer: NVS 4200M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.2.0 NVIDIA 304.43 Direct Rendering: Yes

your card and the correct drivers are correctly recognized.

[Talegolas]

Thanks Zero2

This line made me think it was failing.
X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) FAILED: nvidia Resolution: 1600x900@60.0hz

cheers!

[zerozero]

ahh that is an issue with inxi, sometimes it reports that failed but then it gives the correct glx renderer information
not to worry about