Cinnamon crashing and turning off screen

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xox101
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Cinnamon crashing and turning off screen

Post by xox101 »

I have spent the last few hours updating three family laptops to Mint 17, all with a clean install. Two Dells and a Toshiba. Both Dells are the same model. Cinnamon will crash on start-up on the Toshiba on occasion but it is rare and is solved with a quick reboot. However on one of the Dells the problem is more serious.

I have now installed Mint twice on this machine but the same problem occurs. As soon as I start Firefox and enter a term in the search bar and click the enter key Firefox will freeze followed a few seconds later with the whole desktop going to a black screen, almost as if the screen has been turned off. The power, wifi and hard drive lights are still on and flashing so the laptop is still switched on but no amount of button pressing will bring the screen back. I have to reboot and as with the Toshiba I sometimes get a Cinnamon has crashed message. Trying to restart Cinnamon simply leads to another crash and I have to reboot again.

On the first install I installed all the updates before opening Firefox. On the second I opened Firefox first. The result is the same. Firefox freezes and the desktop disappears so it isn't anything in the updates that is causing this. This laptop ran Mint 15 Cinnamon with no problem for the last year or so and this problem has never reared it's head. I also have MInt 17 Cinnamon running on my Lenovo X200 without any problems.

I have tried the FN screen on/off key and also tried restarting X with ctrl-alt-backspace but with no result. I have to manually turn the machine off and then reboot to get a desktop back. But as soon as I open Firefox the same thing happens again.

I am assuming this has something to do with Cinnamon but what? Has anybody got any ideas?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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xox101
Level 3
Level 3
Posts: 114
Joined: Sat Jan 29, 2011 7:34 pm

Re: Cinnamon crashing and turning off screen

Post by xox101 »

So I installed MATE and have exactly the same problem. Open Firefox and the system freezes and then turns off the monitor. So not Cinnamon then but what is causing this is beyond me!

Uninstalled Firefox and reinstalled. Now it seems to be working ok. But it is now doing the same in Chrome.
RickBrock

Re: Cinnamon crashing and turning off screen

Post by RickBrock »

Hi,
Same issue here... MINT 17.2 xfce and the brand new latest updates from the mintupdate thing as of 20-sep-2015
Did you ever get any help?
Many thanks
Rick
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