I have just installed Mint on an old PC which has an Intel 82845 graphics card and am finding that upon login Cinnamon is crashing back to fallback mode.

lshw -C video shows it to be an 82845G vag_controller so I am at a loss as to how to solve.

Cheers

Baz

$ inxi -SGx

System: Host: Sues-Desktop Kernel: 3.11.0-12-generic i686 (32 bit, gcc: 4.8.1) Desktop: Gnome Distro: Linux Mint 16 Petra
Graphics: Card: Intel 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device bus-ID: 00:02.0
X.Org: 1.14.3 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1280x1024@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: N/A GLX Version: N/A Direct Rendering: N/A


$ lshw -C video

*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 01
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
resources: irq:16 memory:f0000000-f7ffffff memory:fc400000-fc47ffff

I have a Dell Dimension 2400 with the same Intel 82845G graphics and have recently installed Mint 16 with Cinnamon. As reported by others, the "Cinnamon just crashed and is in fallback mode" message has happened on this machine. Tried updating everything, including Cinnamon. Another problem along with this was that Adobe Flash Player will not work. I've loaded a couple Flash alternatives and they do OK on YouTube but not on my bridge-playing site. So far I cannot find anything that will get the full Cinnamon working, but I do have all the menus, just in the top left instead of bottom left.

In the end I ended up installing MATE