Caja kept crashing, installing Konqueror + forced hard restart brings black screen
 

I've been running Mint for a few years now but still consider myself a newbie because I haven't invested a lot of time in understanding how the system works. Mostly I wanted a reliable OS and have been learning as I go along. I don't use the technical information enough to retain it well and becoming a Mint guru falls lower on my list of interests than my other endeavors.

I upgraded from Mint 13 Mate to 16 Mate at the end of December and was quite happy with almost everything. The one problem I've been having is that Caja kept crashing. Every time I attempted to rename a file or folder in Caja it simply crashed itself. It didn't seem to matter if I only had one instance open or several it would simply crash and shut them all down.

Last night I was trying to create a new folder and name it and couldn't get Caja to cooperate at all. Most times I could just keep trying to rename the folder until eventually I would have success but not last night. I decided to try something else. The description of Konqueror seemed like a possibility so I installed it via the synaptic package manager.

When I clicked to open Konqueror it opened and opened and continued to open hundreds of new instances of itself. I could not figure out how to shut it down. Within a few minutes the computer seemed to freeze up. Eventually I had to reboot to get it moving again.

Now when I try to run Mint 16 Mate I get as far as the login screen. Once logged in the screen goes black except for the mouse pointer which will move around in a small area of the upper left part of the screen.

Running the OS in recovery mode scrolls past faster than I can read anything then offers me the chance to log in normally. When I chose to log in I'm given a portion of the login screen, again just the upper left quarter of the screen. The login isn't actually visible on the screen but when I type in the password it is accepted, the screen goes black but for the mouse pointer.

Is there any way to fix this without doing a complete fresh install? I have many programs installed and don't want to lose them. We are under a tight data cap from our ISPs and dread the thought of downloading all those programs again. If I have to start over I may as well try something else and not go through this again.

Any suggestions?

Mint is dual booted on an HP desktop box with Windows 7. Windows seems to be functional but is so aggravatingly slow I barely have the patience to boot into it.

I don't know if this helps clear anything up but I'm getting the error:

(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) Could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock


xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to x server: Connection refused
xinit: server error
xauth error in locking authority file /root/.Xauthority

My main computer = HP P6240f, Intel Core 2 quad CPU, Q8300 2.5GHz, 8 Gig Ram, 64 bit. Display adapters intel G45/G43 Express Chipset, Atheros 802.11 a/b/g/n dual band network module.

The fact that your computer produces an error message "unable to create /tmp/.tX0-lock" suggests that
you may have a 100% full partition. It is possible that Konqueror has filled entirely your partition or inode table when crashing. I don't have any experience with Mint, so I can only offer you some general ideas.

You might be able to enter at the boot prompt a runlevel lower than the one at which the X-Window system is
started (say 'linux single' that will give you a root shell) and check the disk occupation with 'df' and if
indeed your partition is full erase the files created by Konqueror by 'rm /tmp/*'.
If you can't enter a runlevel at boot time, your installation CD/DVD might be a 'Live' distribution that will
allow you to boot the computer by selecting in the BIOS booting from optical media. Using that live distribution, you may have access to a working X-Window system and use Caja to examine the occupation of the
partitions and clean the /tmp directory.

However, you may have a more serious problem of disk corruption with the shutdown that you did after Konqueror froze. If that is the case, you will need to use 'fsck' to try to repair your partitions. Here, you will need to know the type of filesystem you are using (ext4,btrfs,reiserfs,...) to know which fsck command you need.

Another problem could be that you were running Konqueror as root instead of a regular user, in which case
it may have damaged some important configuration files under /etc.

In the last two cases, since you are a beginner, you may prefer to reinstall your system. Do you have backups of your data ? If not, you should first install on Windows 7 a program such as theseto allow you to access
the (I assume you are using ext3 or ext4) linux partitions. Then, you should use that program to copy
the files and directories under /home (maybe ...\HOME under Windows 7) on an external USB drive.
Once you have done that, you should reinstall. Personnally, I would recommend you to avoid reinstalling
Mint 16 and use instead CentOS, Scientific Linux or Springdale. They are all very reliable (Scientific Linux is used at CERN and Fermilab)
and use GNOME2 as their windowing environment. Since the Scientific Linux installer will erase any previous Linux partitions that you have, it is important to do the backups first.