How do I restart Cinnamon from the tty?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Hit Alt+F2, type r and hit enter.