First off: I'm fairly new to linux. On hindsight it's easy to see how things didn't work, but hey...that's hindsight for you.
Okay...the problem: on suggestion by someone, I installed gallium nine drivers following the commands given here. Afterwards, cinnamon only worked in fallback and programs mostly refused to launch. Thinking this wasn't going as planned, I followed the steps to uninstall the installed PPA's. That's when things got worse. I noticed that the purge commands on that page removed more than just the installed ones, but I let it finish because interrupting probably would've caused even more problems. However, since then, booting the partition just results in a black screen. :-\
If I boot 'advanced mode', then 'recovery mode' and then 'resume normal boot', I can boot in terminal mode (it gives a warning that some graphic drivers require a full graphical boot and so will fail when resuming from recovery'). However, no matter what kind of changes I (attempt to) make, I can't get it to boot in cinnamon again.
What I did so far:
-fix broken packages (none found)
-following the guide again in the hope to at least be able to start cinnamon in fallback mode (didn't work; they are now removed again)
-sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get dist-upgrade (this reinstalled a whole bunch of stuff...but didn't help the main problem)
-uninstall and reinstall cinnamon (worked fine...but didn't solve the issue)
My guess is that the original installation or uninstall of that repository overwrote or deleted the original drivers or configuration, and is now somehow attempting to boot things without proper driver (manually attempting to start cinnamon gives an error that the service is "masked", which is apparently something more restrictive than 'disabled'). The hindsight thing is that that gallium nine thing isn't something for the regular intel graphic card that comes with my rig (see below).
So...I think this is all I can mention at this point. There isn't much on the drive (it's a testing laptop), but I rather not reinstall mint if there is another option. Hence this thread...
...anyone have any suggestions on this? Or any questions?
(oh...a small note on the latter: I'm currently writing this on another computer, so if you want me to output code, I'm afraid I will need some extra info on how to output the content from the screen into a file onto a file on a USB stick first. Sorry about that, but it's been ages since I used a DOS prompt and a linux prompt is...well...unknown territory to me.)
In any case: thanks for reading.
System:
OS: Linux mint 18-64 bit, cinnamon (core: 4.4.0.-38-generic)
System: fujitsu lifebook A512 (a relatively old laptop brand)
Graphic card: Intel corporation 3rd gen core processor graphics controller (rev 09) (via lspci | grep VGA)
