Cinnamon Mint 17.3 crashes to fallback mode - HELP please!!!
 

I'm pretty much a total Linux newbie, having been a Windows user for over 20 years. I'm making the switch to Linux, using Mint Cinnamon 17.3 64 bit and working on one of the ex-Windows PCs in my home network.

After playing around dual booting for a few weeks, a few days ago I successfully installed Cinnamon Mint 17.3 on my PC as a single boot OS. I have now been converting my existing internal NTFS drives to EXT4. I converted one internal drive successfully and transferred the original files back onto it.

However I hit the problem above when trying to convert a second internal hard drive. I'd converted it to EXT and was setting up the mounting and sharing parameters. Partway through I got an error which I ignored, something along the lines of "uid 0" and "setuid bit" error. I couldn't get the drive to share so I rebooted - when I logged in, Mint loaded some startup programs but then crashed with the message "Cinnamon just crashed. You are Currently running in Fallback mode." Trying to reload is no use, it just goes round in a loop.

I found I had no access to terminal and doing some reading up on the forums I managed to access this through a Ctrl-Alt shortcut (forgot which now). I read a few suggested actions on the forums which I have tried with the following results:

glxinfo : - produces "Error: unable to open display"
cinnamon --replace: - produces "Window manager error: unable to open X display"
sudo apt dist-upgrade: produces "sudo: /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 and must have the setuid bit set" which looks very like the original error before this problem manifested itself.

I'm pretty much a total newbie to Linux so I've not a clue what to do next. I'm posting this from one of my original Windows PCs as I don't know how to get to the other programs having loaded Terminal in fallback mode! Help please!!!

Thanks

Alan

Welcome to LQ!

From what you posted I'd say there is possible filesystem corruption on your main hard drive. I'd boot from a liveCD and run fsck on sda1 (or whatever is your root filesystem). Then I'd run smartctl tests. The hard drive may be going bad.

Thanks Emerson will do.

Regards

Alan

I've spoken to a handful of people here and they had trouble with Cinnamon crashing.
It was solved by installing another desktop environment.

You could give Mate, XFCE or KDE a try.
http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-insta...namon-edition/

https://www.smartmontools.org/
http://www.linuxtechi.com/smartctl-m...ol-hard-drive/

I think this one is not caused by Cinnamon.

Yup-

Hopefully OP won't have to replace the HDD.

This might help-
http://askubuntu.com/questions/45286...setuid-bit-set