Problems with external monitor Mint20 Cinnamon

[LRibeiro55]

`Laptop HP Pavilion Gaming Notebook HP Intel© Core™ i7-6700HQ 64bit with three partitions with Cinnamon MINT 18.3, 19.3 and 20. Problem is in LM20, the other are okay.

LM20 Kernel: 5.4.0-39-generic Desktop: Cinnamon 4.6.6 Graphics: Device-1: Intel HD Graphics 530 Device-2: NVIDIA GM107M [GeForce GTX 950M] Driver manager Nvidea driver 440 External monitor ASUS VX278Q (27″), via HDMI cable

Problem: Connect external monitor, everything Ok. Define external as primary, OK. If I set laptop monitor off (leaving only external on as primary) AND reboot, the problem happens: ext. monitor goes dark (no wallpaper whatsoever), only remains panel and desktop icons. Mouse is there, I can move it and click, but nothing happens (icons and menu don’t respond). In this situation, I can only do two things: -shutdown the computer on the physical button. -unplug the HDMI cable, forcing the display back to the laptop, but if I do so, the laptop image is complete with wallpaper and responds to the mouse, but the image is not stable: flickers and jumps around.

The only way I can get the config I want (external as primary, laptop off) is:

1. Start PC with hdmi cable off. Everything is fine.
2. Connect HDMI, external as primary, laptop off. It stays OK until I reboot, in which case the problem described happens. OR: Do 1 and 2, but leaving laptop monitor on, either as mirror or as secondary. In this case, i can reboot without problem.

So it seems that whenever the laptop starts with his screen off, the external monitor doesn’t work well. If the laptop starts with its screen on, the external monitor functions ok. With my previous MINT 18.x and 19.x, everything was fine.

[psygnoser]

Computer/laptop: Lenovo P1 Gen1 OS: Fedora 32, kernel: 5.7.7, Cinnamon 4.6.5 Graphics: NVIDIA Corporation GP107GLM [Quadro P1000 Mobile] (rev a1), driver: proprietary nVidia v440.100 External monitor connected via HDMI.

I have a similar problem where my monitor setup is configured like so: External monitor is primary and ON, laptop monitor is OFF. This configuration however crashes Cinnamon (while starting session) and goes into Openbox fallback mode where there is an dialog prompt to restart Cinnamon; clicking the restart dialog doesn't help - it just crashes over and over. If however I unplug the external monitor and then restart Cinnamon it works and interestingly after that if I then re-plug the external monitor back in it again works fine until I restart/logout.

So It seems that Cinnamon has an issue starting while the external monitor is ON ans set as primary and laptop monitor is set to OFF.

This issue is new to Cinnamon 4.6.x and it never occurred on any older versions.

[LRibeiro55]

To complete my information, I upload my xsession-errors file, obtained with the error-producing situation (power-on with external monitor attached as primary, desktop off, resulting in ext. monitor black except panel & icons)

xsession-errors.txt

[mtwebster]

@LRibeiro55 would you mind trying the packages noted in this comment: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/9402#issuecomment-652602199

They fix another very related issue.

[leigh123linux]

@psygnoser Try the fedora package I built

https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=46474086

[psygnoser]

@leigh123linux The package fixes the issue. Thanks!

[anangpermana]

@leigh123linux The package fixes the issue. Thanks!

how to install package in linux mint

[stevedonato]

Why the Linux programmers NOT do regression testing? It is obvious they do Little if any regression testing. Almost every release update causes something that did work to fail after the update.