Cinnamon Desktop Environment

[balamuralik]

Cinnamon Desktop Environment

Cinnamon is a DE(Desktop Environment). DE is a collection of software, which collectively provide you a seamless Desktop experience. They are the reason, normal people who have no knowledge about the internal working of computer are able to use computers for a wide variety of purposes. Cinnamon is one such collection which is different. Different how? We will see, But for now, let’s just say that Cinnamon played a decisive role in making Linux mint, the most popular distro in the Linux world.

Cinnamon is different. It is not aiming at technical grounds like being lightweight or configurable or pretty. It is just trying to be as simple as it can get for the new users. It is also lightweight when we disable the effects. But The greatest contribution of Cinnamon is making Mint the most popular distribution by bringing a lot of new users into Linux ecosystem. For that reason, Cinnamon is different. Cinnamon is the most user-friendly DE right now.

Inside cinnamon

 Cinnamon uses cinnamon shell ( Shell is the graphical user interface which you see. It acts as a mediator between you and the system) which is forked from gnome shell. Actually, cinnamon is mostly forked from Gnome. Gnome is also a DE ( But a far extensive one than cinnamon), which underwent some radical changes while upgrading from version 2 to version 3. So, cinnamon was born to rescue and recover the distribution known as Linux mint.
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Cinnamon is divided into components such as Muffin, Nemo and others. Muffin is its window manager which is mostly irrelevant to new users. Nemo is a file manager which is pretty easy to use. And it is really perfect for basic tasks.

Configuration

Coming to the configuration, Cinnamon provides enough to help yourself make home by personalizing the necessary parts. For example, configuring the menu by right clicking it.The configurations are what decide the extent to which a user can utilize his time on a Computer. That is why we are provided with four workspaces. Now, coming to the applets part, they are not just there for show. We can control multimedia players from the sound applet. The WiFi networks from the network manager applet and so on.The settings are categorized and orderly placed. We can easily understand this setup and where to configure what.
We can also change the themes, icons etc.. From settings. We can even get online themes and install them within the settings.


Cinnamon 2.6

Cinnamon 2.6 Released With New Features & Changes, Install In Ubuntu 15.04
Cinnamon 2.6 has been officially released with many interesting changes and improvements. Cinnamon 2.6 will be used in Linux Mint 17.2 "Rafaela"

What's New In Cinnamon 2.6 ?

Cinnamon 2.6 has received some great changes that make it more stable and easier. So now let's get started without wasting any more time.

*Desktop freezes

In earlier version some users might have faced desktop freeze issues that made users to terminate the session. But now whenever cinnamon freezes you can restart cinnamon without loosing any work. Unlike before you had to press Ctrl + Alt + Backspace which terminates the session and cancel all of your work. But now you can restart Cinnamon with default assigned shortcut key Ctrl + Alt + Escape and that restarts the whole session and your session is exactly the same as it was.

*logind

You no longer need to recompile Cinnamon to choose between consolekit and logind support. This is done in gsettings and you can decide which relevant Cinnamon components use which session/power-management backend:

    Set org.cinnamon.desktop.session session-manager-uses-logind to true to make Cinnamon rely on logind to restart/shutdown/suspend/hibernate the computer from the     shutdown dialog, or to false to restart/ shutdown the computer via consolekit and suspend/hibernate via upower.
    Set org.cinnamon.desktop.session settings-daemon-uses-logind in a similar fashion to control suspending/hibernating on idle or via multimedia keys.
    Set org.cinnamon.desktop.session screensaver-uses-logind to true to make the screensaver listen to logind, or to false to make it listen to console kit.


*Multi-Monitor Supportt

Support for multiple monitors was improved. Better window list actions and new keybindings allow you to move windows to other monitors (Super+Shift with arrow keys by default). But the most significant improvement is that you can now have multiple panels and place them across multiple monitors.

Applets are better than before at running multiple instances of themselves and some of them got smarter to accommodate multi-monitor/multi-panel setups. For instance a window list applet won’t show you windows from another monitor if that monitor has a panel with its own window list.

*Panels

Panels can now be added/removed/configured individually and moved to different positions across one or multiple monitors.

*Applets

A new “inhibit” applet was introduced which allows you to quickly turn notifications off or to disable power management. This applet is handy when performing presentations, to prevent unwanted notifications to pop up, to prevent the screen from dimming brightness or the screen to get locked.  You no longer need to modify your power settings, you can just temporarily disable all that.

Installing Cinnamon

If you have installed any Linux Mint application, first of all remove that application(s) and PPA from your system. If you added Noobslab's Mint PPA first remove it with this command -
(sudo apt-get install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:noobslab/mint)


To install Cinnamon 2.6 in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid/14.10 Utopic/14.04 Trusty/other related derivative systems, open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and use the following commands in the Terminal:

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$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install cinnamon


To install Cinnamon 2.6 in Centos or other related derivative systems, open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and use the following commands in the Terminal:

Installing X window system and lightdm

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# yum groupinstall "X Window system" -y
# yum install lightdm -yInstalling Cinnamon 2.6

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# yum install cjs cinnamon-menus cinnamon-control-center cinnamon-translations cinnamon-settings-daemon cinnamon-screensaver nemo cinnamon-session muffin cinnamon-desktop cinnamon -y


Adding Cinnamon Session

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# echo "exec /usr/bin/cinnamon-session" >> ~/.xinitrc
Starting the GUI

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# startx
Adding cinnamon GUI to systemd desktop run level 5 environment

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# ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/runlevel5.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target
Finally Reboot the system

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# reboot