[SOLVED][Help/Support] "unable to launch "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" X session"

9 days ago by QualifiedKitten to c/linux

TLDR: I tried to install updates yesterday and now I can't get past the login screen.

Linux Mint 21.3 on a Lenovo Yoga 370. I'm able to boot to live USB. I never got around to setting up Timeshift.

I was running the update manager yesterday, but admittedly just blindly clicking okay. Eventually the process completed and I rebooted, then went to check for updates again. This time, it was giving me an error message telling me to use the "Broken" filter. Reading some forum posts on the topic didn't help me find this, so I tried again to install a few remaining updates, those failed, so I tried rebooting again. Now it boots up normally until an error saying, "unable to launch "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" X session --- "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" not found; falling back to default session." I click "okay", then it brings up the log in screen. When I enter my password, it just goes back to the "unable to launch..." error message.

I've done some digging through forum results for similar issues, but haven't found anything that works, just lots of dead ends and/or things that are well over my head.

daggermoon 2 points 8 days ago

How committed are you to Mint? I generally have fewer issues with CachyOS and other Arch based distros. Fedora, and Debian are also worth checking out. As for the desktop environment; KDE is definitely worth trying.

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QualifiedKitten 2 points 8 days ago

Long term? I'm open to checking out others, but I fear that reinstalling Mint or switching to a different distro without actually fixing the problem first would be taking the easy way out and passing up a learning experience.

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daggermoon 2 points 8 days ago

I understand and respect that. In that case X11 is kind of dated. I believe Wayland on Mint is in a pretty good state now. Are you able to select a Wayland session on the lock screen? A Wayland session might bypass this issue altogether.

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QualifiedKitten 2 points 8 days ago

I've heard those words before, and that's about as far as my experience with them goes. From the lock screen, I found options for

Cinnamon (Default)
Cinnamon (Software Rendering)
Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)

I got everything working again, so it's too late to find out if one of those would've worked, but thanks for teaching me something new!

Edit: Oh shit! Selecting a different DE from the list brings me back to the same session? All my apps are still open when switching DEs under the same user! New rabbithole to explore! Any beginner friendly links to share?

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Successful_Try543 2 points 9 days ago

Try logging in using a terminal session by pressing e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F2
Then establish a network connection with the network manager nmcli or nmtui.

To fix the issues, you can then run

sudo apt update
sudo apt -f install

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QualifiedKitten 2 points 9 days ago

Both nmcli and nmtui instruct me to install network-manager using sudo apt install network-manager, but when I run the command, it says

Package network-manager is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source

E: Package 'network-manager' has no installation candidate

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Successful_Try543 2 points 9 days ago

Then, I would boot a live session from a USB stick or DVD and chroot into your Mint installation from there.

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QualifiedKitten 2 points 8 days ago

Thanks, I'm looking at the Arch wiki and searching other posts to try and fill in the details, but I'm still not getting network connectivity to work "outside" the live USB environment.

So far, I've booted to live USB, connected to WiFi, opened up a terminal session, and initially, nmcli and nmtui indicate an active WiFi connection. I'm using the same laptop to read other guides, so I'm confident that I'm online.

Looking at things via the GUI, I see that the hard drive has 2 partitions, one says EFI System, the other says Linux Filesystem. I've made sure both are mounted.

Following the steps under section 4.3 Using chroot, I cd to the Linux Filesystem partition, and things seem to be going well until I run cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/resolv.conf, which says they're the same file. I went on anyway to chroot to the Linux filesystem partition, tried to check the network connection and unsurprisingly, it's still telling me to install network-manager.

In case I assumed incorrectly about which partition to chroot, I opened a fresh terminal session and tried again on the EFI System partition, and that fails at mount -t proc /proc proc/, saying the mount point doesn't exist.

Once I get network connectivity working, I'm still not confident that I know what next steps are, but in hindsight, I suspect the "Failed to fetch..." and "Could not resolve..." errors I was running into while following other guides were probably due to lack of network connectivity on my end.

Edit: Am I a dumbass and the Arch wiki isn't at all applicable to Mint in this situation?

Edit 2: After more digging, I've tried ping and host, and it seems that chroot does in fact have network connectivity, so it seems there's a problem with the DNS name resolution? I used the GUI file browser to find the /etc/resolv.conf file on both the live USB and hard drive and of course they're identical.

Edit 3: IT WORKS AGAIN!!! OMG I DID IT! THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH!!!!! I might be forgetting something I did along the way, but this forum post helped me figure out how to fix the DNS issue, and then the steps in one of the very first posts I read finally worked!

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Successful_Try543 2 points 8 days ago

Congratulations!

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