All window managers broken - Rebecca XFCE

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Tallone55
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All window managers broken - Rebecca XFCE

Post by Tallone55 »

Background on system:
I have an Nvidia GPU that is not fully supported by Nouveau, as a result I have to (manually) install a proprietary driver from Nvidia, registered with dkms so that it doesn't break with kernel updates. Thanks to this, I have had great stability with this driver. However, dkms updated yesterday, and suddenly, everything relating to the desktop is broken.

Symptoms/steps taken:
The first symptom was a failure for my functioning desktop to be able to access openGL, which is usually a symptom of a broken graphics driver.

After that, I rebooted and my login screen came up in 640x480. Upon logging in, my desktop was also broken, wrong resolution.
I resigned myself to re-installing the driver, and re-registering it with dkms (again, manually)
However, this didn't work.

After retrying this a couple times with various versions of the driver, I reinstalled dkms. This didn't change anything either.

Next, I turned off my computer. The next morning I swapped out my Nvidia GPU for a Radeon card, and uninstalled all Nvidia related packages (nvidia-common, etc.) This made it so that I could reboot into my monitors native resolution, and the greeter came up in the right resolution, but logging in through the greeter leads to the resolution bumping down from 1280x1024 to 1024x768. This is manageable, but obviously not optimal. In addition, Cinnamon, which I installed along with XFCE crashes on launch and goes into "fallback mode" However, Cinnamon in fallback mode is running at the proper resolution, but missing toolbars and the ability to resize. KDE is a mix of the two, running at full resolution and not outright crashing, but not letting me do things like drag windows around and missing toolbars for windows.

I have since refreshed my xorg.conf using

Code: Select all

Xorg -configure
for no change.

Any hint as to what specifically is causing the problem would be amazing, and a solution would be better.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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exploder
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Re: All window managers broken - Rebecca XFCE

Post by exploder »

I had problems today after an update too... I have an AMD E1 processor with the crappy on chip graphics, can't remember what the system says the graphics are off the top of my head. Anyway, to get things back to normal I ended up upgrading the 3.19 kernel to the latest one, think I went from 3.19.18 to 3.19.22. That with the proprietary drivers got everything working right again. You might try the same since you have the ATI card installed.
Tallone55
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Re: All window managers broken - Rebecca XFCE

Post by Tallone55 »

I'm using 3.13.0-37, and since update manager doesn't tell me I should install something else I doubt that an outdated Kernel is my problem. Thank you for the advice though. Some addional information, upon creating a new account, I found that my issue with resolution on XFCE is user-specific, it didn't happen on the new account. However, all the problems with KDE and Cinnamon continued to happen, and XFCE still has stability issues
Tallone55
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Re: All window managers broken - Rebecca XFCE

Post by Tallone55 »

Which settings do I need to move from the Guest account to my personal one in order to fix resolution on both?

*edit*
Yeah... why didn't I just use the display settings application from the beginning...

Anyway, Update, XFCE is now working normally-ish, but KDE and Cinnamon are completely broken. Window managers are not drawing window borders, and Cinnamon still crashes at launch.
MtnDewManiac
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Re: All window managers broken - Rebecca XFCE

Post by MtnDewManiac »

The fallback mode in Cinnamon probably means that your graphics setup is broken. Have you tried Driver Manager?

The possibility of the update to a newer kernel might be applicable. It depends on whether the newer kernel addresses a specific issue and/or supports your hardware better (generally speaking, the newest hardware might work better with a newer kernel) AND there being no new issues - or regressions of old ones - or you being able to deal with ones if they exist. Kernel updates routinely address security issues. You can run Update Manager and select View / Linux kernels to see which kernel(s) is/are installed, which are available, and read about each one's (known) fixes and regressions. Do NOT remove your working kernel, lol.

I would continue to try to address the graphics side of the equation unless/until I got it squared away.

Regards,
MDM
Mint 18 Xfce 4.12.

If guns kill people, then pencils misspell words, cars make people drive drunk, and spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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