Hope I'm posting this in the right place; please let me know if I should move it.
When logging in, I encountered the error:
Code: Select all
unable to launch "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" X session --- "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" not found; falling back to default session.
(To write this post I had to sift through a long output file from a
script
command and there were a lot of messed up characters in there. So bear with me if there are any typos or omissions.)I pressed ctrl+alt+f1 to enter the fallback terminal. I ran
sudo apt update
, but it failed.Code: Select all
Failed to fetch http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/victoria/InRelease Could not resolve 'packages.linuxmint.com'
Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jammy/InRelease Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'
Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jammy-updates/InRelease Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'
Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jammy-backports/InRelease Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'
Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jammy-security/InRelease Could not resolve 'security.ubuntu.com'
Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
--fix-missing
didn't work either.I verified that my connection and router were working with another machine. So I figured the sources list must have gotten messed up.
cat /etc/apt/sources.list
returned:Code: Select all
#deb cdrom:[Linux Mint 21.2 _Victoria_ - Release amd64 20230711]/ jammy main
# This system was installed using small removable media
# (e.g. netinst, live or single CD). The matching "deb cdrom"
# entries were disabled at the end of the installation process.
# For information about how to configure apt package sources,
# see the sources.list(5) manual.
cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
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# Do not edit this file manually, use Software Sources instead.
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com victoria main upstream import backport #id:linuxmint_main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-security main restricted universe multiverse
Next I tried the
ping
command. No matter what server I pinged, I got ping: <url>: Name or service not known
where "<url>" == the website I was trying to ping.So I ran
cat /etc/hosts
:Code: Select all
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 <name>
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
/etc/hosts
and the output of hostname
, so this file seems correct to me too.At this point I've accepted the fact that I might have to reinstall the OS, but I at the very least I want to figure out what went wrong so I can learn from this. I've only been using Mint for a few months, but it has a reputation as a mature and stable distro, so I assume this must have been my fault (right?).
But if I could get Cinnamon working again that would be great.
Anyway, my best guess is that this happened because I uninstalled a few packages the day before. Specifically, I removed
bluetooth
and libbluetooth3
. That second one jumps out in particular because it showed up as a dependency when I tried to sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon
. (This install failed too, of course.)Another possibility is that this has to do with a crash that happened about a week before this error. I was running a flatpak update and using a USB switch (like a KVM switch but with only USB) to use a different machine. But at some point my Mint machine stopped responding and stopped sending output to the monitor. I had to hard shut it down. But it ran fine after that, booting several more times with no apparent problems before the big error. It seems like the USB switch might have been the culprit here; the other machine had weird visual bugs whenever I switched to it (but it didn't crash).
The only other thing I can think of: A couple times in the past few months, Cinnamon crashed in the middle of use (not when starting). But it was much less severe. The fallback GUI actually worked, and logging out and back in fixed it. So I assumed these bugs were small edge cases and didn't think anything of it.
Any suggestions as to what might have gone wrong or how to fix Cinnamon would be greatly appreciated.