Unable to change screen settings on Linux Mint (SettingsDaemon was not provided by any .service files)

Question

I'm trying to set up a second screen on my laptop. I plugged the screen using the VGA port and go to Preferences -> Display.

The screen is correctly detected, but when I try to activate it, an error is raised:

Failure of the configuration application: %s (translated from the French sentence from the screenshot below)

GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.cinnamon.SettingsDaemon was not provided by any .service files

I don't know if it can help:

~$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)

I did not find anything on the Internet about this specific setting... Does anyone know how to fix this? Thanks.

Answer 1

I resolved the problem by upgrading to the last version of Linux Mint.

I don't know if the answer of @Homme Zwaagstra would solve the issue, so I prefer to accept my own answer.

Answer 2

I received this error because cinnamon-settings-daemon was not running. You can check if it is running as the following command will list it:

pgrep -fa cinnamon-settings-daemon

If cinnamon-settings-daemon appears in the output of the above command then your issue is different to mine. Otherwise, run it from the terminal as follows:

cinnamon-settings-daemon &

This should enable you to change the screen settings.

Out of interest, cinnamon-settings-daemon wasn't starting on login because of this issue. Doing the following and then running cinnamon-settings-daemon fixed it for me:

rm -f ~/.config/monitors.xml{,.backup}

Answer 3

Old thread but i had exactly the same issue as written. I solved the issue by removing cinnamon-settings-daemon-xrandr.desktop from the .config/autostart and restarting.

rm -f ~/.config/autostart/cinnamon-settings-daemon-xrandr.desktop

Removing ~/.config/monitors.xml did not work in my instance.

Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon (v4.2.4), Kernal 4.15.0-70-generic

Answer 4

I had a similar problem to what Homme Zwaagstra described. The difference, however, was that I had accidentally turned off cinnamon-settings-daemon as a startup application. If you are having this problem you could open up your startup applications manager and make sure that cinnamon-settings-daemon is running on startup.