Linux - Troubleshooting

Boot Problems

Mint fails to boot. Lands in BusyBox with an (initramfs) prompt

This is most commonly caused by corruption of the filesystem (Either a bad shutdown or a failing drive...)

Run the fsck command to repair the filesystem (Note: it might be a partition other than sda1, you can do an ls /dev/sd* & see if there are more partitions...)

• fsck -y /dev/sda1

Sit back & watch all the confusing stuff scroll by.

Then tell the machine to reboot.

• reboot

Mint 19 Update Manager occasionally seems to have an issue where it cannot refresh the update list.

Most likely, it is a repository problem that will resolve itself if you just wait a bit & try again.

Mint is trying to eliminate Samba...

• [SOLVEDMint 19 Network SAMBA shares not shownin File Manager]
• Mint 19 and Samba File Sharing Changes
• HowTo: Samba Browsing Problems Checklist
• Resetting Mint's Default umask to 002

Unable to launch "cinnamon-session-cinnamon"

apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

"You have X broken package on your system!

I was updating, upgrading Thunderbird from the Update Manager. I got a message:

"You have 1 broken package on your system!
Use the "Broken" filter to locate it."

What is that, how do I run it?

• sudo apt-get install -f

I was removing unwanted software from my Linux Mint machine and went too far...

• Unable to launch "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" X session "cinnamon-session-cinnamon" not found; Falling back to default session
• aaarrrggg...
• Open an SSH session to the machine
  • apt install mint-meta-cinnamon
• aaahhh...   :)

RDP

In order to access a machine through RDP, the user MUST have a valid .xsession file.

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Re: Linux Mint 18 Remote Desktop (No Security types supported)

It wouldn't matter if the box you're coming from is Windows 7/8/10, MacOS, or Linux, or if you're running RealVNC, tightVNC, or Remmina--you'll have the same problem. The encryption used by Vino-server on Ubuntu/LM seems to be incompatible with that used by anything else and the result is no security type (0) instead of off/none (1) or normal (2). The only way to make it work is to diable its incompatible encyrption. One way is:

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption false

Once you do that, you want to ensure VNC/5900+ is not open in your firewall (gufw). You can then tunnel VNC through ssh (install OpenSSH Server) or use RDP (install xrdp) for security. However, if you do the latter, you'll find Vino also doesn't spawn on port 5910+ as xrdp expects. So you'll have to edit the xrdp config file and replace port=-1 with port=5900 to get it to work. You'll also have to have a logged in session running on the server for this VNC to work.

Install xrdp on a Raspberry Pi and it just works.I have several running headless for various functions. sessman runs on 3350 and xrdp on 3389. Upon connection, Xvnc wakes up on 5910 for xrdp to link to.

Desktop: HP Z240 Quad-Core Xeon, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD, Nvidia graphics, 27" monitor
Laptop:::: HP Zbook Quad-Core i7,,,,, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD, Nvidia graphics, 15" display
OS Both: Linux Mint 18 Sarah Cinnamon, kernel 4.4.0-45.66

Mint 19.3 machine periodically fails to properly use my local DNS server

I'm thinking it's related to the machine it happens to being due for a complete rebuild...

Dunno what's causing this, but a quick fix seems to be:

• sudo service systemd-resolved restart

But not always... :(

Dealing with Cinnamon Crashes

Restarting Cinnamon from the command line

If you can SSH into the machine (I most commonly have to deal with this on VMs...), you can often restart Cinnamon by:

• cinnamon --replace --display=:0 &

(This came from a discussion on the Linux Mint forums)