"Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon in fallbackmode." - why?

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roadam

"Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon in fallbackmode." - why?

Post by roadam »

Hi,
Cinnamon 17.1 reinstalled 2 days ago after problem with sound devices - suddenly disapeared.
Today I left Cinnamon for couple of hours (forgot turn comp off).
Then I saw "Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon is running in fallbackmode."
Rebooting didn't help. Crashed immediately after reboot.
The only way of recovery was running in text mode (without X):

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove cinnamon
and then:

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sudo apt-get install cinnamon
and

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sudo reboot
System is fully restored.
How can I find a reason of crash?
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austin.texas
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Re: "Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon in fallbackmode." - why?

Post by austin.texas »

You can open the log file viewer (Menu > Administration > Log File Viewer) and see if there are any error messages in there.
Mint 18.2 Cinnamon, Quad core AMD A8-3870 with Radeon HD Graphics 6550D, 8GB DDR3, Ralink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
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roadam

Re: "Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon in fallbackmode." - why?

Post by roadam »

I could, but I have SSD so set log files (ex. syslog, auth.log, dpkg.log, Xorg.0.log) to RAM => actual session logs are only accessible.
In fstab:

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# Modification for SSD
tmpfs      /var/log        tmpfs      defaults,noatime        0    0
tmpfs      /tmp          tmpfs      defaults,noatime,mode=1777    0    0
Did anybody have such or similar accident?
Any tips are welcome.

PS.Forgot to mention I had to configure Xorg too.
I've done this by installing new Nvidia driver accordingly.
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Re: "Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon in fallbackmode." - why?

Post by MellowTigger »

I did my first reboot after a few days of usage. I'm now having the same problem. I'll try roadam's previously mentioned solution to get a working Cinnamon back. Meanwhile, I'm still in the fallback mode.

I did use Applications / System Tools / Log File Viewer. It does show a prominent error that "/var/log/mail.log" does not exist, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant. The only other odd messages are these, which also don't seem relevant to Cinnamon not working.

mdm[1741]: PAM unable to dlopen(pam_kwallet.so): /lib/security/pam_kwallet.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
kernel: [ 1321.865069] systemd-hostnamed[3677]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname!

p.s. I tried the earlier commands to reinstall cinnamon then reboot. It did not solve my problem. I still have to use Fallback Mode. :( And this time, I do not get any menu system at all, just desktop icons and a right-click menu.
p.p.s. One other oddity. When first launching Firefox, I get a window that says, "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system."
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Re: "Cinnamon has crashed. Cinnamon in fallbackmode." - why?

Post by MellowTigger »

For what it's worth, I was also unable to switch back to Nouveau drivers during this escapade. Thankfully, other people are having this same issue this morning, and I was able to get back my Nvidia-331 drivers (and a working Cinnamon) with help in this thread.
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