[tlug] Cinnamon has crashed

[Brian Chandler <brian@example.com>]

Yes well. A couple of weeks ago I had odd problems when using the 
memsource editor -- cursor up and down keys behaving erratically etc. 
Swapping keyboards etc had no effect. This may or may not be relevant, 
but this morning it was just "Cinnamon has crashed. Would you like to 
restart?" and restarting just cycles through this.

So I tried to reinstall it; got a (root) terminal somehow, but all of 
the apt-get type commands I found as possible solutions failed. I get 
lots of messages:

Failed to fetch .... this and that
Could not resolve (things like) security.ubuntu.com / archive.ubuntu.com

This was in response to:
apt-get dist-upgrade --fix-missing

These domains are reachable from another computer on the LAN, but oh 
look I see that on the problem machine ping returns "unknown host". And 
pinging a number gives:

connect: network unreachable

So I guess there is some low-level problem with the network, but have no 
idea where to start on that. Help!

Thanks for any suggestions
Brian Chandler