Mint Linux Troubleshooting

The X Windows of Linux Mint from a Top Down Perspective

• X.org server - Prior to installing a desktop environment, a functional X server installation is required.
• Cinnamon window manager - Known as cinnamon-desktop-environment, a Xorg Desktop Environment is a bundle of programs, which share a common graphical user interface (GUI). Most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities
• LightDM display manager - Also known as a “login manager”, a display manager is responsible for starting the display server and loading the desktop. This happens right after your correctly enter your username and password. Mint uses the LightDM login manager.
• Slick-Greeter display manager front-end - Mint does not use the Unity Greeter as the front-end for LightDM. The Slick-Greeter is a fork of Unity Greeter and has been used since Mint 18.2. Since it no longer uses the MDM greeter, avoid following any guides that reference MDM.

Display Manager Resolution Settings

When you run the display manager in Mint, the settings (screen resolution preference) stored in the following location:

• ~/.config/monitors.xml

You should keep a backup of that file handy in the event you get a bad display resolution that prevents Cinnamon from loading correctly or you bump one of the many bugs that prevent you from changing your display preferences back.

Linux Mint uses xrandr to change the display settings dynamically rather than referring to xorg.conf, so the xorg.conf is pretty much ignored for this purpose. Display manger writes to monitors.xml the resolution and monitor properties. Starting Xorg, xrandr is invoked. How this currently works, by using xrandr instead of traditional means, and how xorg.conf is seemingly useless is not well documented.

Xrandr is used to set the size, orientation and/or reflection of the outputs for a screen. It can also set the screen size. Xrandr does not save changes to the xorg.conf file.

• System -> Preferences -> Display Resolution saves the settings in ~/.config/monitors.xml

Cinnamon Window List Applet Aligning Right

Note: Using dconf with Mint 18.3 Cinnamon desktop seems to work well, however, Mint 19.2 with Cinnamon 4.x the dconf procedure is not recommended. Bad side effects. Buggy implementation not properly updated for newer release of DM.

There's a couple different Window List Applets that can be active on the bottom panel. One is "Window List" which is described in Solution #1 and the other is "Grouped Window List" which is described in Solution #2. There are a number of Applets that are available for addition and removal from the panel. Some confusion exists on various solutions from online forums not taking into account which panel applet a user might have activated.

SOLUTION #1: Using dconf. (Your mileage may vary)

Why this starts to happen out of the blue after being fine prior makes no sense to me, however, it seems to happen. Here's the fix:

1. Install dconf Editor

sudo apt install dconf-tools

2. Open dconf Editor from the Cinnamon Menu

MENU -> Administration -> deconf Editor

3. There's a settings Tree on the left pane of dconf Editor. You'll have to click on the following branches to the sub branch:

org -> cinnamon 

4. Within the "org, cinnamon" branch look in the right pane and scroll down to find the bold face item "enable-applets"

 enable-applets

5. Once you click on "enabled-applets" a sub-pane will appear below on the right. It will have labels like: Schema, Summary, Description, Type, and Default. Under "Default" find something that looks like:

'panel1:center:11:window-list@cinnamon.org', 

To modify it you have to click on the label "enabled-applets" on the top part of the right pane, because the bottom part is read-only. As you make an edit on the top part, right of the label, where it is displayed as a single line, you will see the changes on the bottom read-only display panel. Funky (or POS) design right? I agree. Your best bet is to copy the entire key, paste it into a text editor like Kate, make the edit, then copy and paste it back into where the key was copied from. So, make the following change...

'panel1:left:11:window-list@cinnamon.org', 

Step 5 may have some variations. Those will be mentioned here when available. You'll have to experiment. Information source: linuxmint.com forum topic Cinnamon 1.3 released...

• Note: On Mint 19.2 Cinnamon 4.2.3 the process fix was different. The values already were set to "left" and the fix that work was to slide the check for "Use default value" This seemed to put application windows back to the left.

Problem observed with Cinnamon 3.6.6, above suggested resolution inapplicable as alignment already defined "left."

Here's an example of default in Cinnamon 3.6.6 while alignment issue observed, Linux mint 18.3, and it still wrongly aligns right...

['panel1:right:0:systray@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:left:0:menu@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:left:1:show-desktop@cinnamon.org', 
'panel1:left:2:panel-launchers@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:left:3:window-list@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:right:1:keyboard@cinnamon.org', 
'panel1:right:2:notifications@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:right:3:removable-drives@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:right:4:user@cinnamon.org', 
'panel1:right:5:network@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:right:6:bluetooth@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:right:7:power@cinnamon.org', 
'panel1:right:8:calendar@cinnamon.org', 'panel1:right:9:sound@cinnamon.org']

The last item in the text box, panel1:right:0:window-list@cinnamon.org:13' should be changed to: 'panel1:left:9:window-list@cinnamon.org:13'

The "window-list" refers to the open applications, and the number after the left/right colon '0' is the priority. Priority 0 means, put before other lists. We want it to be '9' as in low priority rather than '0' or high priority, otherwise you end up with docked icons pushed to the right, and we don't want that.

update 2020: Just delete the line that refers to window-list@cinnamon.org, get rid of the entire thing after the ,

SOLUTION #2: Using Panel Edit Mode (recommended for Cinnamon 4.2.3)

On MS Windows it is known as the "taskbar" on Cinnamon it is the "panel."

1. Right click the panel when not over any active panel item and activate panel edit mode.
2. Remove the Applet called "Window List"
3. Keep the Applet called "Grouped Window List"

The Grouped Window List applet still has a previous popup that is annoying and the applet settings does not offer a way to disable it. Although the Grouped Window List Applet is named "grouped" you can disable Window grouping. The advantage of the Grouped Window List applet is that it takes up less space in the panel. Each open application appears as a square taking up less space.

Grouped Window List - there are two options relating to thumbnail preview and "show the window when hovering" which can be annoying, the latter being the most annoying. You may or may not want to disable "Show Thumbnails" but I find the need to disable "Show the window when hovering its thumbnail" very necessary, what an obnoxious behavior!!!!

1. Right Click any open application icon in the panel -> Preferences -> Configure
2. On the GENERAL tab/button of the Grouped Window List dialog disable "Group windows by applocation"
3. On the THUMBNAILS tab/button of the Grouped Window List dialog, Thumbnail, you may wish to disable "Show thumbnails," and in the same area under the "Hover Peek" heading I strongly recommend you disable "Show the window when hovering its thumbnail"

All of this applies to Mint 19.2 with Cinnamon 4.x. I am sure the devs will change all of the feature names and locations, add more obnoxious crap, and make it increasingly obfuscated to control or disable by the next release.

Reset / Restart Cinnamon w/o closing all other programs

Enter ALT + F2 to go into "run command" then type the letter "r" and press enter - this will restart cinnamon, however, your cinnamon preferences will also be reset.

From console

pkill -HUP -f "cinnamon --replace"

xorg graphical login loop

After you enter your password at the graphical login, you are taken back to the same login without a usable x session starting.

Most common cause: File permissions problem in your user home directory of the .Xauthority file. If you note that the file is owned by root instead of your user. To resolve simply

sudo chwon nicolep ~/.Xauthority

The local user must have permissions to .Xauthority in order for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 X11 authorization to work. The security authentication mechanisms used by X.org store keys inside ~/.Xauthority Furthermore, the xauth command can parse Xauthority file and extract the key values. You do not want to open and edit the file using a standard text editor.

To check the .Xauthority values yourself type 'xauth' at the command prompt

$ xauth

then issue the 'list' command or the 'info' command

xauth> list

graphic driver problem, X wont start, load in lowres

You can force xorg to load in low resolution MESA compatibility. You have to add 'nomodeset' to the kernel boot parameters at the start of boot.

fix / restore / reset x.org when it wont load

One one occasion the xorg server stopped working after a screen resolution change. The xorg log was not helpful other than indicating a segment fault.

sudo bash
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeon

The last line is for ATI cards only.

Change File Associations / Open With

Changing File Association for applications Open With in Nemo PCManFM Thunar etc... Mint Cinnamon. File extension. shell menu Properties->Open With->Show Other Applications - if you create a file association that is wrong or you need to edit this, older versions of mint lack an interface to accomplish this. So, you can locate and directly edit the configuration file created by this action. The file is a .desktop file.

cd ~/.local/share/applications

You will see a bunch of .desktop files each containing characters including in part the name you selected for the association you created. These can be directly edited with a text editor like vim. The filename will start with "userapp" and end with ".desktop" Try this:

ls -l ~/.local/share/applications/userapp*.desktop

Example: I created an association for .xm music files to open in a program called MTRACKER yet forgot to select the option to "open in terminal." This happened when I did the following:

1. right clicked on a music file ending in the .xm extension
2. chose "Open With" and then scrolled to the bottom of the list and chose again "Open With..."
3. in the "choose application" dialog clicked the tab "Custom Command Line"

Doing this creates a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications and for my example it was called userapp-mtracker-M50TT1.desktop

vi  ~/.local/share/applications/userapp-mtracker-M50TT1.desktop

You can edit or delete the .desktop file. If you delete it then you can go though the file manager and create it again in the correct way.

Related

• Kubuntu and Ubuntu Linux Distribution Reference
• Dual Boot Linux and Linux
• Mint Linux Troubleshooting