How to recover from desktop freeze without losing running windows?
I don't know what the Cinnamon guys renamed gnome-shell
when they forked, so you'll have to find this out. It's probably either cinnamon-shell
or cinnamon
or something. I'll assume it's called cinnamon
.
Now, the GNOME Shell - and by extension, Cinnamon - will respond to SIGHUP
by completely reinitializing. It's basically the same as typing r
into the AltF2 dialog. So, the solution is easy:
- Switch to a virtual console by pressing CtrlAltF21.
- Log in.
- Type
killall -HUP cinnamon
. - Switch back to whatever virtual console was running Xorg.
It may take a couple seconds for Cinnamon to reinitialize.
1: This is a good choice as some distributions run display managers on tty1, some on tty7/tty8 (depending on the DM). No one uses tty2.