Fresh install of Mint refuses to start Cinnamon

[jcockx]

I've just tried to install Mint 14 Cinnamon from a freshly downloaded ISO on an old Dell PC.
It works, but will always start a Gnome desktop, no Cinnamon.
If I do a live boot from the same DVD on my much newer laptop, I get Cinnamon as expected.
On the old PC, I tried to logout and explicitly select a Cinnamon session, but no lock: I still get Gnome.
What could be causing this problem?

[kc1di]

I've just tried to install Mint 14 Cinnamon from a freshly downloaded ISO on an old Dell PC.
It works, but will always start a Gnome desktop, no Cinnamon.
If I do a live boot from the same DVD on my much newer laptop, I get Cinnamon as expected.
On the old PC, I tried to logout and explicitly select a Cinnamon session, but no lock: I still get Gnome.
What could be causing this problem?

how old is the dell it could be that your getting gnome fall back because your video card will not do composting/3d which cinnamon requires.
good luck

[jcockx]

No idea how old it is, but certainly more than 5 years.

How can I find out what video card it has?

Why does Mint silently fall back to Gnome, without give me any warning? As I am not very familiar with Mint yet, it took me quite a bit of time to figure out what was happening.

[kc1di]

you can find your video card by going to a terminal and type the following command:

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lspci

it will give you and output with a list near the top of the list will be your video controller.

I think it is the upstream ubuntu base that automatically reverted to gnome fallback if 3d acceleration was not present.
but not sure about that.

[jcockx]

According to lspci, my video card is an Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller. I am still not sure whether this is supposed to be supported by Cinnamon or not, or how to find out.

I would like to make a suggestion to the Mint developers to give the user some kind of warning when Cinnamon cannot be started, instead of silently falling back to Gnome. The silent fallback is quite confusing, especially when one installs Mint/Cinnamon for the first time and does not know what to expect. What would be the appropriate place to do this? Is this a bug or a new idea? All suggestions are welcome.

[karlchen]

Hello, kc1di, hello, jcockx.

Not that it helps too much, but: The fact that the live system can launch Cinnamon, although the installed system falls back to Gnome, does not support the hypothesis that the video card is to be blamed. If the video card were not able to run Cinnamon, then the live system should startup in some fallback mode as well. Right?

Just compared the Intel graphics card to yours, jcockx. Yet, this does not help too much, either. Mine is

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00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)

and inxi displays this:

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inxi -Gx
Graphics:  Card: Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0 
           X.Org: 1.11.3 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1680x1050@59.9hz 
           GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.4 Direct Rendering: Yes

This is a 3-years-old Dell Latitude E6400 notebook. And Cinnamon 1.6.7 runs fine here.

Kind regards,
Karl

[kc1di]

Hi karlchen,

Your Idea would be correct sort of, but when he said in the original post that the livecd worked, he said it worked on a much newer system. not the one in question.
Still think it's the video card or the driver being installed for it.

[kc1di]

jcockx,

your Intel Corporation 82865G graphics does not have a good track record with newer Ubuntu releases either unity will not run on it so I very much doubt that
Cinnamon will either since they both use 3D graphic acceleration. You may be better off with mate. Not as fancy but perhaps it would run better Or even xfce.
Good luck,
Dave

[karlchen]

Hello, kc1d1.

[...] he said in the original post that the livecd worked, he said it worked on a much newer system

Oops, yes, you are right. Seems I ignored the term "much newer laptop".
So you are probably right. The older Intel card may not be supported well by recent Ubuntu and Mint editions any longer.

Cheers,
Karl