No desktop icons on boot.
 

Hello, I have been using Petra for nearly a year.

I shut down every night, and the system has repeatedly functioned properly on every boot.

Recently and not always, the system boots and I have my desktop background but without any icons or any tray applets.

When this occurs, I can do nothing from the desktop and I must shutdown using the manual stop button.

When the unit shutsdown, I press the start button and the unit has booted normally, with desktop icons.

All of the desktop icons were created using Chrome.

Is there any way of curing this problem short of reloading the OS?

The machine is a HP-a1630n, with HDD and 2.4G of ram.

Thanks much,
Jim

This sounds like a problem for which the solution will depend on the desktop environment. Which one are you running?

Either way, Petra is not supported anymore. Even if you can solve this, you should definitely reinstall a more recent release. Petra wasn't a LTS (long term support) release, which is why it is already outdated. Install Rebecca (17.1) and you'll be ok for 5 years.

Hello, I am going to follow your advice.

I have ordered the disc for Rebecca.

Thanks much,
Jim

In fact there is no need to order discs. You can download the isos from the mint download page and either burn them on CD or create a bootable usb stick.

I wouldn't bother now since you have ordered the disc anyway, but next time you know there is a faster (and cheaper) way. Do not hesitate to ask for help here regarding the process of putting the iso on cd / usb.