Cannot open Terminal

Hi All, I’m new here. Been using a Linux distro since 2012 as I was preparing for Windows XP end of support/life in 2014.
Anyway, for almost a year I’ve been unable to open a terminal in Mint 18. The little wheel spins around and around then just disappears. Not sure exactly when it started as I don’t use terminal too often. I even tried installing a different terminal to see if that would work and I could do some troubleshooting but no luck with that either.
Here’s laptop specs from System info
System Info.

OS - Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon 64 bit

Cinnamon version - 3.6.7

Linux Kernel - 4.15.0-62 generic

Processor - Intel Pentium Dual CPU 2370 @ 1.73GHz x 2

Memory - 3.8GiB

Hard drive - 284.6 GB

Graphics card - Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary)

It’s an old laptop, I think I bought it in 2008 . Please don’t tell me to buy something newer, I can’t so need to repair this

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I see from this you are using 18.3. not as I first read this as just 18.
The simple solution to this is to do a clean install. Once you have done that do a complete update of everything before attempting to use the terminal. Reboot and then try again.
If the problem keeps happening then just upgrade as I take it you have checked the installation media is correct.

I do not think you need to buy another laptop as Mint should run on what you have now.

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Yep, Mint runs fine. I was just expecting the usual ‘Widows’ user responses, get rid of the dinosaur and buy something new so thought I would pre-empt them. Should have realised the Linux community isn’t like that :blush:

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I agree with @ElectricDandySlider that a clean install would most likely fix your problem. Also unlike Windows, Liunx takes only about 10-15 minutes to install.

On the other hand …
On google, I did a search on “linux can’t open terminal” and got a large number of hits. You might want to browse thru some of them to see if one might be a fix to your problem.

No we are nothing like elsewhere, we try to help not tell others what to do. We are all learning and if one of us doesn’t have an answer another might have.
As @easyt50 has said there are a lot of answers on google if you have the time to search and try them. Personally I am far too lazy to do that and if I can’t solve something then I do a back up and re-install as it clears it any way.

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Those users should see my home. Part of a room is blocked with old computers. They are “too old” they say. Then I put on a slim Linux without a desktop and I feel like I am driving a ferrari. For my purposes, I rarely need a DE. This is one of the most performance impacting things about an OS.

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is this happening when you try and click on the icon in the applications menu or from the quick launch icons in the panel or maybe both?

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Hmm, DuckDuckGo didn’t find any thing useful when I tried same search. Guess I’ll give Google a try and see what I find.
Tried Google, found that Ctrl + Alt + F3 opens tty terminal but closes everything else (?)
Also found I posted too many replies and had to wait 22 hrs before I could post a new reply but was too busy yesterday to check anything here

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Oh, it happens with icon, even if I try from menu. Cant get it with Ctrl + Alt + T either, the little spin wheel icon comes up for about 5 seconds then goes away

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My advice would still be to do a clean reinstall, it is the simplest solution and will clear this if it just a problem with this install.

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/usr/share/applications has .desktop files for most (maybe all? not sure. haven’t ever checked) of your desktop icons that have info about the program or binary file they launch. mine in mint 18 lists gnome-terminal (Exec=gnome-terminal) and running which gnome-terminal in a terminal (which would be hard to do that without one :slight_smile:) shows where that binary is. mine is in /usr/bin and shows up as gnome-terminal.real. it might be possible to run it from there if it is just the shortcut (.destop file) that has stopped working correctly for whatever reason.

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Can you open and install software from the Software Center? If yes then please install another terminal application. And then use the command line to reinstall the original terminal application.

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Software Centre didn’t always open but today it was fine. I installed Guake terminal then did immediate update and upgrade. The upgrade after completion had these two lines
Unknown media type in type ‘all/all’
Unknown media type in type ‘all/allfiles’
No idea what they are or how to find them?

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did you try running the executable?

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Uummm… what and how? Sorry, I can turn around and forget what I was doing, kinda worries me as there is so much on tv about Alzheimer’s. I find using terminal to update I get better results for some reason? Problem is, even after years of playing with Linux, I still don’t know what I’m doing without having literature to read from

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no need to apologize at all :slight_smile: it can be a bit of a balancing act trying to share enough information to get the job done without sharing so much that it is too much.


if you open your file manager, in the left column there is an option labeled “File System” (your root or / directory). after you click on that, you will see a bunch of folders. one of those should be usr (/usr). after you click on that, the first one at the top left should be bin (/usr/bin). that should be where you can find the gnome-terminal.real executable which will hopefully launch your terminal.

of course this is all based on my mint 18.3 installation which could vary a bit from yours. if you don’t find it there or it doesn’t work. hopefully we can find one that does with a little more looking around :slight_smile:

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Thanks, that part was easy. Terminal didn’t open. I got some pics of properties and the usr files though but can’t upload them even though they are png? I guess I don’t have permissions yet, many forums require either minimum amount of posts or a specific amount of time before you can post picture. It says root is owner and I don’t have permission to open file. I do have a toolbar icon of the guake terminal which opens without problems. Being a bit paranoid I think NSA did something (I’m a British subject living in USA so automatically monitored under patriot act)

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it might be possible to paste in links (the same restrictions might apply. i’m not particularly well-versed that part of the forum rules) from imgur if you are interested in trying that method. https://imgur.com. you do have to sign up there in order to upload and get links. the gif at bottom is a direct link from there as opposed to an upload here.

as far as that goes, did you get a warning message after double-clicking the file or something else?

it should be helpful that you can use guake. if you could run the following ls -l /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.real (ls lists the specified file. the -l option shows its properties), we can take a look at the permissions. mine looks like:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.real
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 81800 Nov 21 2016 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.real

https://imgur.com/nradZqN

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I I don’t get any warnings if I click on icons , just the spinning wheel then nothing. I got a warning when I tried to open the files as described above. When I ran script I got exactly the same result as you :-
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 81800 Nov 21 2016 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.real

I’m OK using Guake terminal, pretty sure impact on system is minimal? I see I now have a picture as well. It’s my Honda CB550, about 1980 ish rolling over 100,000 miles and still able to do 100mph

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that was going to be one of my next points. as long as guake works and your system is stable, it is up to you if you want to hunt down why the regular terminal won’t function.

i have seen your motorcycle avatar for the last few days. at first i thought it was welding goggles from the tiny thumbnail until i clicked on it for moe info the other day :slight_smile:

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