Cinnamon

Related articles
Desktop environment
Nemo
Cinnamon
is a
desktop environment
which combines a traditional desktop layout with modern graphical effects. The underlying technology was forked from the
GNOME
desktop. 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
.
Note
If you have an Intel GPU, make sure you are
not using xf86-video-intel
with Cinnamon as it may freeze at random times otherwise, but you can still move the mouse. Use the
modesetting(4)
driver instead by removing
xf86-video-intel
(KDE also
recommends this
).
Cinnamon applications
Cinnamon introduces X-Apps which are based on GNOME Core Applications but are changed to work across Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE; they have the traditional user interface (UI).
Application
GNOME
Cinnamon
Text editor
Gedit/Pluma
xed
Image viewer
Eye of GNOME
xviewer
Document viewer
Evince/Atril
xreader
Media player
Totem
xplayer
AUR
Image organizer
gThumb
pix
AUR
Fallback mode
On the event when Cinnamon crashes, its Fallback mode activates. To control opened windows in this mode, you need to install
metacity
package and
gnome-panel
to have a taskbar.
Starting
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
:
~/.xinitrc
exec cinnamon-session
If the
Cinnamon (Software Rendering)
session is required, use
cinnamon-session-cinnamon2d
instead of
cinnamon-session
.
Restarting Cinnamon
The following needs to be executed as the user the Cinnamon instance is running under:
$ cinnamon-dbus-command RestartCinnamon 1
To restart Cinnamon from outside a dbus session, you can use something like this:
$ DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=/run/user/${TARGET_USER_UID}/bus"
$ sudo -u "#${TARGET_USER_UID}" -H dbus-send --bus=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS --type=method_call --dest=org.Cinnamon /org/Cinnamon org.Cinnamon.RestartCinnamon boolean:true 2> /dev/null
Note
Calling RestartCinnamon with a boolean determines whether Cinnamon will draw the OSD (On-Screen-Display) to inform the user that Cinnamon is restarting.
Configuration
Cinnamon is quite easy to configure — most common settings can be configured graphically. Its usability can be expanded 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 -Po '(?<=cs_).+(?=\.py)'
Printers
For configure printers, install the
system-config-printer
package.
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
For Bluetooth device support, install the
blueman
package. See
Blueman
for more information.
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
.
Note
If applets do not appear, restart Cinnamon with
r
in the
Alt+F2
dialog box.
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.
Manage languages used in Cinnamon
To add/remove languages: see
Locale
.
To change between enabled languages: install the
mintlocale
AUR
package.
For Cinnamon to correctly display another language: install the
cinnamon-translations
package.
To change the keyboard layout: navigate to
System Settings > Hardware > Keyboard > Layouts
.
Use a different window manager
Cinnamon does not support using a different window manager.
Tips and tricks
Creating custom applets
The official tutorial on creating a Cinnamon
applet
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
.
Additionally, the official mint wallpapers are available for every release. Checkout the
AUR
.
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.
Menu editor
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.desktop.wm.preferences num-workspaces 4
Replacing 4 with the number of workspaces you want.
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
Themes, icons and backgrounds
Linux Mint styled themes, icons and backgrounds can be installed with the
mint-themes
AUR
,
mint-l-theme
AUR
,
mint-x-icons
AUR
,
mint-y-icons
AUR
,
mint-artwork
AUR
and
mint-backgrounds
AUR
packages. Whereby the latter is a collection of all backgrounds included in all Linux Mint Versions. Backgrounds of individual Linux Mint versions are also available over the AUR.
The themes and icons can be edited in
Settings > Themes
. The backgrounds in
Settings > Backgrounds
.
Setting the desktop theme via shell can be done like this:
$ gsettings set org.cinnamon.theme name "
Theme-Name
"
Sound events
Cinnamon does not come with sounds used for events like the startup of the desktop that are also used in Linux Mint by default. These sound effects can be installed with the
mint-artwork
AUR
package. The sound events can be edited in
Settings > Sound > Sound Effects
.
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:
$ dconf dump /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/ > keybindings-backup.dconf
To later import it on another device:
$ dconf load /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/ < keybindings-backup.dconf
Screenshot
As explained in
Taking a screenshot
, installing
gnome-screenshot
will add this functionality. The default shortcut key is
PrintScreen
key. This binding can be changed in the applet
Menu > Preferences > Keyboard
under
Shortcuts > System > Screenshots and Recording
. The default save directory is
$HOME/Pictures
, but can be customized with eg.
$ gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-screenshot auto-save-directory file:///home/
USER
/
some_path
Prevent Cinnamon from overriding xrandr/xinput configuration
The
cinnamon-settings-daemon
provides a number of plugins which can manage the display, keyboard and mouse. These plugins will override user set configuration (such as
xrandr
commands in the
xinitrc
file). To stop user set configuration from being overridden, it is necessary to prevent the settings daemon plugins from being started.
This can be done by copying the
.desktop
entry for the relevant settings daemon plugin (these will be located in
/etc/xdg/autostart/
) to
$HOME/.config/autostart
. Then append the line
Hidden=true
to each copied entry.
Tip
Start your session with
cinnamon-session --debug
to see which plugins are reported to have been started.
To preserve display, keyboard and mouse settings, consider disabling the following:
cinnamon-settings-daemon-a11y-keyboard.desktop
cinnamon-settings-daemon-a11y-settings.desktop
cinnamon-settings-daemon-keyboard.desktop
cinnamon-settings-daemon-mouse.desktop
cinnamon-settings-daemon-xrandr.desktop
Troubleshooting
Debugging
You can use the
cinnamon-looking-glass
tool (Melange - Cinnamon Debugger) to inspect various things about the Cinnamon environment:
a list of currently-open windows
a list of currently-loaded extensions (applets, desklets, etc.)
logs
The "logs" feature is especially useful if you are encountering crashes (often happening due to extensions no being compatible or buggy).
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. See the
upstream bug report
.
Starting Cinnamon from tty after crash
If Cinnamon is completely unresponsive, it can be restarted from the TTY (
Alt+F2
) with:
$ cinnamon --replace -d :0 &
Video tearing
Because
muffin
is based upon
mutter
, video tearing fixes for
GNOME
should also work in Cinnamon. See
GNOME/Troubleshooting#Tear-free video with Intel HD Graphics
for more information.
Disable the NetworkManager applet
Even if you do not use
NetworkManager
and remove the
Network Manager
applet from the default panel, Cinnamon will still load
nm-applet
and display it in the system tray.
You cannot uninstall the package because it is required by
cinnamon
and
cinnamon-control-center
, but you can still easily disable it. To do so, copy the autostart file from
/etc/xdg/autostart/nm-applet.desktop
to
~/.config/autostart/nm-applet.desktop
. Open it with your favorite text editor and add at the end
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false
.
Alternatively, you can disable it by creating the following symlink:
$ ln -s /bin/true /usr/local/bin/nm-applet
The ability to blacklist particular icons from the system tray (such as the
nm-applet
icon) has been
requested upstream
.
Cinnamon overrides settings in xorg.conf
This article or section is out of date.
Reason:
Removed in Cinnamon 5.4.
[1]
(Discuss in
Talk:Cinnamon
)
Cinnamon overrides custom settings in xorg.conf like display orientation and layout.
Open
System Settings > Startup Applications
and set
Cinnamon Settings Daemon - xrandr
to OFF.
No prompt for root password when launching applications that require root permissions
Cinnamon uses
Polkit
to allow a non-root user to elevate their permissions in order to launch applications that require root permissions (such as
Timeshift
or
GParted
).
Polkit
requires this user to be part of the
wheel
group.
If your user is not part of the
wheel
group, you may not receive the prompt for the root password when launching an application that requires root permissions (and thus the application will not be launched).