I just have experienced a problem I've seen before in these forums, and similar forums. Here is one:
viewtopic.php?p=1696100#p1696100
After (mistakenly) downloading and installing hplip program, I found out that "Change Desktop Background", "Color", "Screensaver" and other applications under the "Preferences" menu don't load. When I try running:
$ cinnamon-settings background
I get "Segment fault: Core Dump"
Most of the posts I read said that HP hplip can break python-dependent applications.
First, I tried removing the HP hplip and re-installing the standard Ubuntu/Mint one from the repository, as per here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1056077 ... or-scanner
But that didn't work. Then I tried the fix outlined here.Let's consider that we have installation file hplip-3.21.6.run in the current directory. We need to extract archive from it and then run uninstallation script.
sh hplip-3.21.6.run --noexec
cd hplip-3.21.6
sudo python3 ./uninstall.py
sudo rm -vrf /usr/share/hplip/
sudo rm -vrf /root/.hplip
sudo rm -v /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-hplip-devices.fdi
Afterwards we install official Ubuntu packages instead (optionally):
sudo apt-get install hplip-gui
viewtopic.php?t=311949
Which involves modifying /etc/imtools.py. I looked in the etc/imtools.py file, but insofar as I could see there was nothing amiss in it to delete or replace and everything looked as it should.
Any ideas? I'm not at my computer right now, so I can't post any information from it, but I can later when I am back home.
I'm thinking as a last resort of downloading and installing the MATE desktop (or KDE), the completely purging Cinnamon then re-downloading it and installing it. But even that may not fix this issue, and I really don't want to do a fresh install as this system has a somewhat complicated LUKS encryption that I didn't set up and I'm not sure I could set it up again right (on the first try, at least).