Cinnamon
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Cinnamon is a desktop environment which provides advanced innovative features and a traditional user experience. The desktop layout is similar to GNOME Panel (GNOME 2); however, the underlying technology was forked from GNOME Shell (GNOME 3). The emphasis is put on making users feel at home and providing them with an easy to use and comfortable desktop experience. As of version 2.0, Cinnamon is a complete desktop environment and not merely a frontend for GNOME like GNOME Shell and Unity.
Installation
Cinnamon can be installed with the package cinnamon, available in the official repositories.
Starting Cinnamon
Graphical log-in
Choose Cinnamon or Cinnamon (Software Rendering) from the menu in a display manager of choice. Cinnamon is the 3D accelerated version, which should normally be used. If you experience problems with your video driver (e.g. artifacts or crashing), try the Cinnamon (Software Rendering) session, which disables 3D acceleration.
Starting Cinnamon manually
If you prefer to start Cinnamon manually from the console, add the following line to Xinitrc (cinnamon 1.9 and up):
~/.xinitrc
exec cinnamon-session
If the Cinnamon (Software Rendering) session is required, use cinnamon-session-cinnamon2d
instead of cinnamon-session
.
Configuration
Cinnamon is quite easy to configure — a lot of the configuration that most people will want can be done graphically. Its usability can be customized with applets and extensions, and also it supports theming.
Cinnamon settings
cinnamon-settings launches a settings module specified on the command line. Without (correct) arguments, it launches System Settings. For example, to start the panel settings:
$ cinnamon-settings panel
To list all available modules:
$ pacman -Ql cinnamon | grep -o "cs_.*\.py" | awk -F'[_.]' '{ print $2 }'
Networking
To add support for the networking module, enable Network Manager. In order for NetworkManager to store Wi-Fi passwords, you will need to also install GNOME Keyring.
Bluetooth
A GNOME bluetooth frontend for Cinnamon Panel and Cinnamon Settings is available in the AUR under the name cinnamon-bluetooth. However, as of 18th November 2014 neither of the cinnamon-bluetooth packages currently build or work properly.
Applets and extensions
While an applet is an addition to the Cinnamon panel, an extension can fully change the Cinnamon experience. They can be installed from the AUR, (package search), or from inside Cinnamon (Get more online):
$ cinnamon-settings applets $ cinnamon-settings extensions
Alternatively, install manually from Cinnamon spices.
Tips and tricks
Creating custom applets/themes
The official tutorial on creating an applet can be found here, and on creating a custom theme can be found here.
Default desktop background wallpaper path
When you add a wallpaper from a custom path in Cinnamon Settings, Cinnamon copies it to ~/.cinnamon/backgrounds
. Thus, with every change of your wallpaper you would have to add your updated wallpaper again from the settings menu or copy / symlink it manually to ~/.cinnamon/backgrounds
.
Show home, filesystem desktop icons
By default Cinnamon starts with desktop icons enabled but with no desktop icons on screen. To show desktop icons for the home folder, the filesystem, the trash, mounted volumes and network servers open Cinnamon settings and click on desktop. Enable the checkboxes of the icons you want to see on screen.
Adding custom command launchers to the Menu applet
The Menu applet supports launching custom commands. Right click on the applet, click on Configure... and then Open the menu editor. Select a sub-menu (or create a new one) and select New Item. Set Name, Command and Comment. Check the launch in terminal checkbox if needed. Leave unchecked for graphical applications. Click OK and close the menu editor afterwards. The launcher is added to the menu.
Workspaces
A workspace pager can be added to the panel. Right click the panel and choose the option Add applets to the panel. Add the Workspace switch applet to the panel. To change its position right click on the panel and change the Panel edit mode on/off switch to on. Click and drag the switcher to the desired position and turn the panel edit mode off when finished.
By default there are 2 workspaces. To add more, hit Control+Alt+Up
to show all workspaces. Then click on the plus sign button on the right of the screen to add more workspaces.
Alternatively, you can choose the number by command-line:
$ gsettings set org.cinnamon number-workspaces 4
Replacing 4 with the number of workspaces you want. To apply the change you need to reboot Cinnamon (for example : Alt-F2 and command r).
Hide desktop icons
The desktop icons rendering feature is enabled in nemo by default. To disable this feature, change the setting with the following command:
$ gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons false
GTK themes and icons
Linux Mint styled themes and icons can be installed from AUR using packages mint-themes and mint-x-icons. The themes can be edited in Settings → Themes → Other settings
.
Resize windows by mouse
To resize windows with Alt+Right click
, use gsettings
:
gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.wm.preferences resize-with-right-button true
Portable keybindings
To export your keyboard shortcut keys, you should do:
dconf dump /org/cinnamon/muffin/keybindings/ >keybindings-backup.dconf
To later import it (for example) on another computer, do:
dconf load /org/cinnamon/muffin/keybindings/ <keybindings-backup.dconf
Troubleshooting
QGtkStyle unable to detect the current theme
Installing libgnome-data solves the problem partially, and QGtkStyle will detect the current GTK+ theme. However, to set the same icon and cursor theme, users must specify them explicitly.
The icon theme for Qt apps can be configured by the following command:
$ gconftool-2 --set --type string /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme Faenza-Dark
This sets the icon theme to Faenza-Dark located in /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Dark
.
The cursor theme for Qt apps can be selected by creating a symbolic link:
$ mkdir ~/.icons $ ln -s /usr/share/icons/Adwaita ~/.icons/default
This sets the cursor theme to Adwaita located in /usr/share/icons/Adwaita
.
Pressing power buttons suspend the system
This is the default behaviour. To change the setting open the cinnamon-settings
panel and click on the "Power Management" option. Change the "When the power button is pressed" option to your desired behaviour.
Volume level is not saved
The volume level is not be saved after reboot. The volume will be at 0 but not muted. Installing alsa-utils will solve the problem.
cinnamon-settings: No module named Image
If cinnamon-settings
does not start with the message that it cannot find a certain module, e.g. the Image module, it is likely that it uses outdated compiled files which refer to no longer existing file locations. In this case remove all *.pyc
files in /usr/lib/cinnamon-settings
and its sub-folders.
Cannot add/remove/change languages used in Cinnamon
The language module was removed from the Cinnamon Control Panel with the release of Cinnamon 2.2 and provided a new package for changing the language settings.
To add/remove languages, see Locale.
To change between enabled languages, install the mintlocale package.
Video tearing
If you experience video tearing whilst playing videos or games under Cinnamon, you should add the following lines to the end of /etc/environment
CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling CLUTTER_VBLANK=True
After rebooting you should have much smoother video under Cinnamon.