mintCast 141: Cinnamony Goodness

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News:

Mint team makes Mint 14 KDE & XFCE RCs available for download and testing. (blog.linuxmint.com) and (blog.linuxmint.com)

Interesting revelations on the future of LMDE inside the Monthly Stats report for November. (blog.linuxmint.com) and the Linux Mint roadmap (github.com)

Richard Stallman calls Ubuntu spyware (arstechnica.com) and Jono Bacon responds! (jonobacon.org)

Valve news heats up: Valve updating game pages to include Linux requirements (techgage.com), Phoronix to start releasing Steam benchmarks (phoronix.com), Steam beta expanded (omgubuntu.co.uk), and Big Picture Linux-based console (phoronix.com)

The Main Topic: All Things Cinnamon

What is it?

According to Clem – “It’s a desktop environment which includes a panel with applets, a workspace manager and a window manager. It was originally forked from Gnome Shell (and mutter) and evolved very differently since. In its latest stable version (1.4) it uses nautilus for file and desktop management and Gnome 3 for background services and session management. Going forward it could replace nautilus with either nemo (a gtk3 fork of nautilus 3) or caja (a gtk2 fork of nautilus 2) to guarantee a better integration with cinnamon, centralized settings and to avoid being impacted from what are considered upcoming upstream regressions (loss of computer shortcut, UI changes in nautilus etc..). Technically it’s written in C and Javascript and uses clutter for its UI. It’s layout and design are influenced by Linux Mint, Gnome 2 and Compiz and it comes with innovative features of its own in particular when it comes to workspace management. Its biggest issue is hardware support as clutter requires 3D acceleration and Cinnamon doesn’t always work for everybody depending on their GPU.”

History

Cinnamon was first announced on Dec 22nd 2011, and released the next day as version 1.1.2, and is a fork of the Gnome Shell. It uses Muffin as its window manager. Muffin is a fork of Mutter.
The latest version made available is 1.67, released on Nov 14th 2012. Cinnamon was first included in Linux Mint 13.

Nemo, a fork of the Gnome Nautilus file manager, is now part of the Cinnamon development process. It is up to version 1.12. It made its distro debut in Linux Mint 14.

Philosophy

Traditional layout, advanced features, easy to use, powerful, flexible.

Settings

15 separate areas where a user can customize their desktop environment.

Menu – set the text and icon that shows on the panel (start button), as well as hover delay, the showing of places and bookmarks and recent files
Panel – choose whether to auto-hide panel, set delay, panel position, number of panels (top & bottom), panel size and panel edit mode
Calendar – Choose to show week dates, date format, use of network time or manually set date, time and time zone
Hot Corner – choose to make the hot corner icon visible, enabled or disabled, hot corner position, function (scale or expo), whether to have an expo or scale applet
Themes – choose theme, choose window theme, whether menus and buttons have icons, and cursor, keybinding, icon and GTK+ theme selection
Effects – Enable or disable desktop effects, enable for dialog boxes, choose effects and duration for closing, mapping, minimizing, maximizing and unmaximizing windows
Applets – enable or disable any installed applet or get additional applets.
Extensions – enable or disable any installed extension or get additional extensions.
Desktop – choose icons that show on desktop including computer, home, network servers, trash and mounted volumes.
Windows – choose resulting actions from double-clicking, middle-clicking and right-clicking on title bar, how to obtain focus on a given window, the position of the minimize, maximize and close buttons, enable or disable aero snapping, edge flipping, attaching dialog windows to the parent windows, setting of alt-tab switcher style, mouse wheel scrolling through window list applet, and enabling the ability for windows which require attention to come to the current workspace.
Workspaces – enable workspace OSD, choose duration and position of OSD, limit workspaces to primary monitor and display Expo view as a grid.
Fonts – set text scaling factor, default, document, monospace and window tiling font, set hinting and antialiasing.
General – enable Looking Glass logging, enable middle click emulation by clicking both left and right mouse buttons, enable or disable notification display
Keyboard – enable key repeat and text cursor blinks, and set their rate, view, set and create keyboard shortcuts
Backgrounds – choose your wallpaper and its aspect, gradient and colors.

Themes

Themes can customize the look of aspects of Cinnamon, including but not limited to the menu, panel, calendar and run dialog.

To install a theme: Download it and decompress it in ~/.themes (or /usr/share/themes to install it system-wide).

There are over 100 themes available on the website. Getting, installing and changing themes is very easy, and can radically change the way your desktop appears. You can also create your own theme following the tutorial on the Cinnamon website. There is also a tutorial for how to create an applet.

Applets

Applets are icons or texts that appear on the panel. Five applets are shipped by default, and developers are free to create their own. A tutorial for creating simple applets is available.

To install an applet: Download it and decompress it in ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets.

Some useful stock applets include one for Accessibility, Brightness (helpful for laptop users), and windows quick list (great if you use workspaces).

If you click on Get new applets, you are taken to the Cinnamon website where there are a large number of applets including one for weather, screenshots, virtual box launcher and much more.

Extensions

Extensions can modify the functionalities of Cinnamon, such as providing a dock or altering the look of the Alt-Tab window switcher.

To install an extension: Download it and decompress it in ~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions.

Extensions appear to be the least developed of these three cinnamon extenders. I had none by default on my Mint 13 box, and there are only 14 up on the website (as compared to 95 applets).

Troubleshooting

The caret symbol near the system tray is the Cinnamon applet. Clicking on it gives you the “Settings”, “Troubleshoot” and “Panel Edit mode” menu choices. From the “Troubleshoot” menu you can restart Cinnamon, start Looking Glass (more on that in a moment), or restore all settings to default. This is great because you can play with all the themes you want and then reset your desktop environment to the default.

Looking Glass

(not to be confused with Project Looking Glass)

Looking Glass is GNOME Shell’s integrated inspector tool and JavaScript console useful for debugging. You can also access Looking Glass by typing ALT+F2, then lg and enter. This feature gives you a view underneath the covers of Cinnamon. It provides a console-type of view of what is happening on your computer. There are multiple tabs to select from including Evaluator, Windows, Errors, Memory and Extensions. It is very geeky in here. Remember that you can close Looking Glass using the ESC key.

Panel Edit mode

When moved to the “On” position, you are able to edit the panel, moving icons around, adding applets, and dragging and dropping applets to change their position.