After I started up my computer, having updated the last time I used it, going past the log in screen just shows the lock-screen background for a little bit, before a black screen with just a cursor. The Lock Screen still works if I shut the laptop lid or leave the computer enough, but the screen doesn’t seem to turn off properly when shutting the lid and most keyboard shortcuts don’t work, though I can still go to tty.

I tried updating. I tried reinstalling Cinnamon. That didn’t work, but installing lxde and selecting that at login worked, but Cinnamon still doesn’t.

I eventually found out that right clicking the black screen Cinnamon desktop still works, and I can get windows such as the terminal like that, but the windows won’t move or resize.

Probably just going to do a new install.

  • muhyb
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    2 months ago

    Purge is used when you want something to be deleted completely, and autoremove is used to clean the rest of the unused dependencies. If those didn’t fix the issue, this could be about your user or user’s home directory. Though the errors indicate a session problem.

    You can try to reset all Cinnamon configuration. dconf reset -f /org/cinnamon/ That will delete everything you changed on Cinnamon so you may want to backup your settings.

    Backup dconf dump /org/cinnamon/ > cinnamon-settings-backup

    Restore dconf load /org/cinnamon/ < cinnamon-settings-backup

    If that still doesn’t work, can you try to add a new user to see if that user can login to Cinnamon? sudo add newuser

    • s12@sopuli.xyzOP
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      2 months ago

      Didn’t work. The add command wasn’t found.

      Wondering if it might be something to do with my graphics drivers?

      • muhyb
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        2 months ago

        Oh my, so sorry about this. Sometimes I tend to not to write a word I’m thinking when I write and it happened to be a command. -_-

        It should be sudo useradd newuser and you also need to attend a password to it so it can login sudo passwd newuser.

        Since you can login with LXDE I don’t think it’s graphics driver related. Maybe changing a display manager would work but I’m not so warm about it. This looks like something low-level went wrong.

        • s12@sopuli.xyzOP
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          2 months ago

          Just got round to trying that. This is weird. When I try to login as the new user; this happens:

          It just goes to a TTY screen that says [FAILED] Failed to start casper-md5check Verify Live ISO checksums. and then returns to the login screen.

          Edit: That same message was shown when I pressed Shud Down, though it did successfully shut down.

          • muhyb
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            2 months ago

            That’s pretty weird. It’s a live ISO error, you shouldn’t get something like that.

            It’s probably not that but if the filesystem is corrupted you can get weird things. Try this: sudo fsck -f /

            If still no effect, login to LXDE and find cinnamon config files under ~/.config/cinnamon, not sure about the exact location since I don’t use Cinnamon but should be something like that. After finding that, change the name to cinnamon.bak and try login to Cinnamon again. If that’s related to configs, you should be able login.

            You can also try different display manager, it seems you currently have lightdm. For instance, sddm could be an alternative.

            sudo apt install sddm
            sudo systemctl stop lightdm
            sudo systemctl disable lightdm
            sudo systemctl enable sddm
            

            then restart.

            If you want to revert this, just sudo systemctl disable sddm and sudo systemctl enable lightdm. You can remove sddm after the experiment.