Blank screen when running cinnamon and cairo dock

Question

Here is the problem that I am haveing. When I log in using Gnome w/ cairo dock I get a blank screen and a mouse cursor. I can not right click or anything. I hit alt f2 and it brings up the tty term. I try to issue cinnamon or compiz or any other manager and it just says that x has no display or something similar. I then have to issue sudo service mdm restart and it brings me back to the login screen.

Then I can login to cinnamon with cairo dock running with no problem. Any help would be appreciated.. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Those commands only work when you are in an xsession and not on a text only session like tty2. You can, however, issue kill commands from there like

sudo killall cairo-dock

and you can restart the xsession by killing lightdm gdm or what ever dm you are using like this

sudo service lightdm restart

or

sudo service gdm restart

Alternatively, if the dm is the culprit you can start x with no dm like this

sudo service lightdm stop
sudo startx

replacing lightdm with your dm.

Finally, you can start those commands that did not work due to no display but you have to specify the display for them to open. I'm not exactly sure how to do this but it's something like display=0:0.