Linux Mint 15 Bug in Greeter

[ChristopherFair]

The version of Linux Mint I am having a problem with is Linux Mint 64 bit edition. The issue manifests when I reboot after the install. The computer hangs before the login screen (it did open once) and waits for input without displaying the login screen. I have to thit ctl-alt-f1 to get to the text input. At that point I type in my authentication then type in "startx" and mint starts up properly. I have a quad core AMD 3.1 GHz system with an nvidia 9600 GTO (8 gbytes of RAM). I did install PANDA3d and also installed Harmony Assistant before the crash. I also did copy my home to my new install of 15. This isn't killer for me because I have an easy work around but I suspect it would sour a newbie on Linux Mint pretty quick.

[Ghislain Côté (ghislain-cote)]

See Forum post : http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?uid=116215&f=208&t=135417&start=0

[Ghislain Côté (ghislain-cote)]

I too have the problem.

The CLI login appears first (for 2-3 seconds), and then I get a "The Greeter application appears to be crashing. Attempting to use a different one." message (in some X messagebox, strangely).

If I click "OK" (only choice), the message return 2-3 times... then a console error message tell me the X display as crashed too many times and will retry in 2 minutes...

Then all is fine and I can login. I could also simply login in a tty and type "startx", but the I get error message about an X server already being at display :0 after 2 minutes...

I have a fresh install of Olivia, with the (recommanded) Nvidia drvier running.

[Ghislain Côté (ghislain-cote)]

I switched to the "nvidia-313-updates" driver (I was using the recommanded "nvidia-310")...

I did not get any error for the past 3 reboots... Is this helping anybody else ?

[ChristopherFair (christopherpfair)]

I agree after installation of NVidia-313-updates the problem vanished. The greeter now shows up as it ought to.

[jlagrone (jrlagrone)]

The "nvidia-313-updates" driver does not fix the issue for me. It does, however, seem to happen less frequently.

[Rufus (balaenoptera-rufus)]

My computer is also affected by the Greeter Application Crashes bug.
It's running Olivia Mate amd64.
The video card is a nVidia GTX 460.
I tried several video drivers available in Mints Driver Manager. That didn't solve the problem, unfortunately.

[John R. Boutiette (boutiettej)]

I am having the same problem. Running Linux Mint Olivia AMD64 bit version with Nvidia GTX 66 Card version 319.23.

 1 out of 4 boots comes with "greeter Error" . I think it has to do something with the Nvidia driver. It worked with the Nouveau Driver okay. I also have a partition with Ubuntiu 13.04 latest and Cinnamon as desktop GDM and works okay.

 One thing I had to do was run a script program to fix the Splash screen on bootup. It took forever and was coming up in VGA mode. Would sit for 2 minutes at login (Terminal mode) then finally boot. Got on the forums and found a fix in Ubuntu forum. Plymouth splash screen fix.
 I don't know if this is associated to this problem but it comes up quicker and doesn't give greeter error as often.

[germulvey (gerardmulvey)]

I'm having the same issue with the mate and cinnamon 64 bit editions of mint 15. Happens with radeonhd 6790 too but less frequently than with nvidia gtx 550 ti.
A workaround is to replace mdm with another display manager. GDM will give you the previous mint login screen from previous versions. This resolves the greeter crashes for me.

[ofb (cottlestonpie)]

This worked for me: switch from default HTML greeter to GDM via Control Centre > Login Window. Have booted eleven times to be reasonably sure the random crash is really fixed.

Mint Mate 15 64bit, nvidia-310, geforce gt520.

[Nick Raptis (airscorp)]

I'm also seeing this.
Olivia MATE, nvidia 660 with 310 driver.

However, once I get the crash, it seems that mdm restarts and I'm able to log in as usual, so for me it's not a biggie.

Two things I'd like to share though:

1. Before mdm started crashing like this, I was seeing another behavior. Sometimes I would end up in mdm and the keyboard would not work. This was probably not related to hardware, as keyboard is always working in grub. The keyboard issue started happening more frequently, until after 5-6 consecutive fails, I first saw the mdm crash and I'm now getting this instead of the keyboard lock behaviour. No way I can be totally certain though, as those happen frequently, but still random (say 'race condition' anyone? :) )

2. I had applied plymouth-fix, which means that boot uses v86d and uvesafb. I'm starting to think that this is relevant and I'd like others with the issue report if they are using it too, so we can either rule it out or look more into it.

[Mike Fairbank (michael-fairbank)]

This bug seems to affect me. It only comes up about 10% of the time when I switch my computer on. When it happens I have to hard reset my machine and hope it doesn't happen next time I log on. I havent tried typing "startx" which other users above report as a successful way to bypass the bug.

I'm using:
LinuxMint 15: olivia (x86-64)
Kernel 3.8.0-10-generic
Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+ x 2
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Corporation C77 (GeForce 8200).

[Jack Teng (tengjack)]

I was doing update from 14 to 15 and previously was on lightDM then switch to mdm after upgarde, and it starts showing this message. I'm installing Mint in VirtualBox.

This is what I did to workaround this problem
I discover that the mdm version on official repository is 1.2.5+olivia(which is what I have after upgrade) but the mdm on live CD is 1.3.1, so what I did is boot into live CD and issue the command "sudo dpkg-repack mdm" and copy the package to my machine and install it again then it works.

I'm running Linux MINT 15 KDE x86-64 on VIrtualBox