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tuks
Asked: 2012-05-30 11:29:35 +0800 CST

How do I restart Cinnamon from the tty?

  • 772

I installed Cinnamon on my Ubuntu 12.04, and it works well, but sometimes it just freezes for no reason. I can move my mouse but can't click on anything.

So I want to restart Cinnamon from tty, like I used to do with gnome shell. How do I do that?

I tried killall cinnamon and nothing happened.

Then I tried export DISPLAY=:0.0 , cinnamon --replace and still nothing.

I guess the command cinnamon is not valid. I don't want to restart the whole X server because then all of my windows will get closed. I just want to restart the window manager cause I believe it is causing the problem.

tty

19 Answers

  1. Hit Alt+F2, type r and hit enter.

    • 155

  2. The cinnamon --replace process can be sent the HUP signal which will trigger it to restart, thus preserving your open window and running applications.

    $ pkill -HUP -f "cinnamon --replace"

    This will take care to send the HUP signal to a process that matches the pattern, "cinnamon --replace". The signal HUP (SIGHUP) tells the process to "Hang Up".

    • 74

  3. This happens to me a lot, too, and this thread is one of the top results when googling for "restart cinnamon". Unfortunately, the instructions don't work for me (only because the display number is wrong!). For future visitors, here's what I do that always helps me.

    1. Cinnamon freezes
    2. Switch tty. I usually go to tty6, Ctrl+Alt+F6
    3. If you need to login first, do so.
    4. Type w (yes, just the letter) and press enter. This commands does a lot of different things, but you need it to figure out the number of the display you are using. The display number is in the column FROM. Mine is :0 (yes, including the colon).
    5. Assuming that cinnamon is already dead (which you would notice by the windows lacking titles and that you can't move different windows around, and perhaps even not being able to use the keyboard), you type export DISPLAY=:0; cinnamon &, and don't forget the colon. I add the ampersand (&) only not to keep that tty busy.

    This always works for me, and I don't lose open windows. Also, I keep these instructions in a file called restartcinnamon, which is just a text file. I keep the file in my Dropbox folder, so no matter what machine I am on I can just type cat ~/Dropbox/restartcinnamon if I need to be reminded of how to do it.

    • 64

  4. Cinnamon has a direct keyboard-shortcut to restart the desktop without restarting any of the running applications:

    ctrl+alt+esc

    Which will probably still work in some cases when the alt+f2 Method does not work anymory

    • 46

  5. The easiest sulution would be:

    killall -HUP cinnamon
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  6. You can restart Cinnamon by:

    1. pressing Alt+F2, type r, and press Enter,

    2. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (restart Xorg),

    3. in TTY use command: sudo service mdm restart

    • 16

  7. When you kill cinnamon, check if it hasn't stopped writing killall cinna and pressing Tab. If the rest of the word appears, make it die with killall -9 cinnamon, and then restart it, using what you tried but without --replace:

    export DISPLAY=:0.0; cinnamon
    • 8

  8. The following combination of the above comments worked for me:

    1. Ctrl-Alt F1 to switch to terminal 1. Log in if necessary
    2. $ w (yes, single letter "w" is a command) to see your display # in the FROM column). For me it was :0 (includes the colon). Also, the TTY column will have the terminal # of your cinnammon session (for me it was tty8).

    3. $ cinnammon --replace --clutter-display=:0 2> /dev/null &

      Notes on this last command:

      • :0 was my display #.
      • & returns control of the terminal
      • the --clutter-display, if not entered, uses the DISPLAY, variable, which is why some of the prior suggestions did EXPORT first. But you can just pass the argument directly to cinnamon. See cinnamon --help for more.
      • 2> /dev/null redirects stderr to nowhere so my terminal does not get cluttered with messages.
    4. Ctrl-Alt-F8 to return to my window cinnamon environment (F8 for me since my terminal was tty8 per the w command above. For you it may not be F8.)

    Net result: this restarted cinnamon in my terminal (tty8) without losing my windows.

    • 3

  9. try this

    1. pressing Ctrl + Alt + F2
    2. export DISPLAY=:0.0; cinnamon --replace
    • 1

  10. I sometimes have that problem when locking the screen: the lock screen doesn't appear and my system seems frozen, with no input working, and I can't log back in.

    My solution is to kill the cinnamon-screensaver process.

    % pkill cinnamon-screen

    pkill uses the info in /proc/PID/stat, and Linux only stores the first 15 characters of the command name, so using "pkill cinnamon-screensaver" won't work.

    Now my system is unlocked, input works again and I have not lost any of my windows. To make the system lockable again, I restart the screensaver.

    % nohup cinnamon-screensaver > /dev/null 2>&1 &

    I redirect to /dev/null to avoid the creation of the nohup.out file.

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