Mint update with NVIDIA breaks Cinnamon

Question

I have Linux Mint 14 64-bit Cinnamon on a desktop with an NVidia GTX 680 graphics card. I downloaded and installed the drivers from the NVIDIA website (installed on TTY1 with sudo service mdm stop). The drivers work and the GPU is fully functional.

However, after running the update manager (because it's a fresh install), the Cinnamon environment becomes severely broken. The title bars are missing and so is the bottom panel. Alt-F2 doesn't work either.

I can get the title bars back with sudo metacity --replace but the panels are still gone.

Setting session to "GNOME Classic" works fine but I much prefer Cinnamon.

How can I go about getting Cinnamon back?

Solution

I've had the very same problem for the second time now. Whenever I update Mint14, the problem comes back; it's really annoying. Luckily, it is a recognized problem that the development team has been working on. After you solve this there will be more problems but I will restrict this post to solving the phase you posted about first.

To solve this, open the terminal (if you can't, use GNOME Classic and create a keyboard shortcut). Now, run sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get upgrade; a bonus is to perform autoremove and clean operations as well. Log out and log in again and the problem will be solved. If you noticed high CPU usage by process cinnamon inform me and i will tell how to solve this.

Comments

[wchargin]

Thanks for your answer. To the best of my knowledge, update updates the repositories and upgrade upgrades any out-of-date packages; could you explain why this sequence works, since I just ran the update manager, which (supposedly) does both of those things? Also, do these commands have to be run from Cinnamon, or is it okay to run them from the Classic shell?

[Moataz Elmasry]

I recommend you use the terminal/shell instead of the update manager, as usually i get this problem when i update using the update manager. Any shell will do, as long as the commands are run.

[wchargin]

Although it still doesn't really make sense to me, your suggestions worked; thanks.

[Moataz Elmasry]

Just as a quick follow-up, you explained it pretty well so i thought you knew why this sequence is necessary. update checks all the repositories you have in your software sources list, comparing the versions of software you have installed with those that are in the repositories. If any are outdated,it adds them to a list of programs that need to be upgraded, it doesn't do any upgrading,just creates a list. Now, when you run upgrade, this is where files get changed and updated.

[wchargin]

Yes, I understand that; however, I don't understand why using the command line to do this is any different than using the update manager.

[Moataz Elmasry]

These aren't the only commands run by the update manager. There is also sudo apt-get dist-upgrade which is considered more powerful but at the same time needs to be used with care. For example, upgrade will not install a new kernel, this is the job of the aforementioned command. Furthermore, the update manager uses more specific flags when running the update and upgrade commands.

[Pdksock]

This did not work for me with nvidia driver 352 on linux mint 17.1