cinnamon restart issue

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dhdurgee
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Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:56 pm

cinnamon restart issue

Post by dhdurgee »

As cinnamon grows in memory usage over time I have been using the restart cinnamon option on the settings menu when it gets over 250MB or so. I ran into a problem with this today, as cinnamon appears to have had problems during restart. The bottom panel never appeared and the windows appeared to have a default appearance. Given I had several apllications open at the time, I browsed over to the /var/log directory and found the following entries in syslog:

Apr 14 10:20:28 DHD-Z560 cinnamon-session[2130]: WARNING: App 'cinnamon.desktop' respawning too quickly
Apr 14 10:20:28 DHD-Z560 cinnamon-session[2130]: CRITICAL: We failed, but the fail whale is dead. Sorry....

Given I had my browser open as well, I tried to find out what action was appropriate in this circumstance. Unfortunately I found little guidance.

I finally tried entering a command in an open terminal window:

cinnamon --replace

This did get cinnamon restarted, but unfortunately I had neglected to detach this and when I attempted to address that I got myself into worse trouble. I wound up having to use Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to a terminal session where I logged in and then issued a shutdown -r 1 to restart the system.

What is the appropriate way to deal with such a restart failure? Would my approach have worked properly if I had included a trailing & to detach it?

Dave
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
MagicMint

Re: cinnamon restart issue

Post by MagicMint »

If it wasn’t a severe lock-up (which I did never experience with cinnamon v2.4.6+ :D ), Ctrl-Alt-Backspace should have been sufficient. There is a hierarchy of rescue steps you can try to restart cinnamon:
  • Alt-F2 r ⏎ — this restarts cinnamon if it’s still alive;
  • Ctrl-Alt-Backspace — this takes you back to the login screen;
  • Alt-Print-S Alt-Print-U Alt-Print-B — this sequence will ALWAYS reboot safely without data loss (except unsaved contents :? ) if the system is definitely locked up.
Once you’re in the console with Ctrl-Alt-F1, you don’t need to reboot either — you can as well issue:

Code: Select all

sudo service mdm restart
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