Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon User Manual

  

The Cinnamon desktop environment is a very large development project.

Nano User Guide Linux Mint Cinnamon man -t man / ps2pdf - man.pdf – Make a pdf of a manual page time i want to access a location, such as installing software for example. I am using Mint 17 Cinnamon. Nano - simple text editor. Cinnamon is a free and open-source desktop environment for the X Window System that derives from GNOME 3 but follows traditional desktop metaphor conventions. Cinnamon is the principal desktop environment of the Linux Mint distribution and is available as an optional desktop for other Linux distributions and other Unix-like operating systems as well. The development of.

The Linux Mint User Guide. Clem: 8 years ago 371 This is the official Linux Mint User Guide, available in many languages in both PDF and ODT formats. (some of these notes may apply for other editions of User manual) jfleen 5 years ago Good for a very basic starting point. I created Linux Mint 12 User Guide in Croatian language. Linux Mint 13 was the first Linux release to ship with the Cinnamon desktop. Since then Linux Mint has a MATE and a Cinnamon edition, both providing users with a conservative desktop paradigm, one forked from GNOME 2 and the other forked and derived from GNOME 3. The Linux Mint User Guide. Introduction to Linux Mint History Purpose Version numbers and codenames Editions Where to find help Installation of Linux Mint Download the ISO Via Torrent Install a Torrent client Download the Torrent file Via a download mirror Read.

  1. This tutorial will guide you on how you can install the latest version of Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon edition on your dedicated machine or a virtual machine. The same instructions also apply for both Mate and Xfce desktop installations. Download Linux Mint 19 ISO Images. First of all, you need to download the ISO image from the links below.
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Between 2006 and 2010 the main desktop environment for Linux Mint was GNOME 2. It was very stable and very popular.

In 2011, Linux Mint 12 was unable to ship with GNOME 2. The upstream GNOME team had released a brand new desktop (GNOME 3 aka “Gnome Shell”) which was using new technologies (Clutter, GTK3), which had a completely different design and implemented a radically different paradigm than its predecessor but which used the same namespaces and thus it couldn’t be installed alongside GNOME 2. Following the decision from Debian to upgrade GNOME to version 3, GNOME 2 was no longer available in Linux Mint.

To tackle this issue two new projects were started:

  • A project called “MATE” was started by a developer called Perberos. Its goal was to rename and repackage GNOME 2 so that it could be just as it was before.
  • A project called “MGSE” was started by Linux Mint. Its goal was to develop extensions for GNOME 3 to give it back some of the functionality it had lost and which was available in GNOME 2 (a panel, a systray, an application menu, a window-centric alt-tab selector, a window-list..etc).

Linux Mint 12 shipped with both MATE and GNOME3+MGSE.

6 months later and after a huge amount of work, MATE was becoming stable, and from a set of extensions MGSE became a fork of GNOME 3 called Cinnamon.

Linux Mint 13 was the first Linux release to ship with the Cinnamon desktop. Since then Linux Mint has a MATE and a Cinnamon edition, both providing users with a conservative desktop paradigm, one forked from GNOME 2 and the other forked and derived from GNOME 3.

Processes¶

Binary view of the various processes within a Cinnamon session

The figure above shows the various processes at play within a Cinnamon session.

After you log in, the following processes are automatically started:

  • cinnamon-session (the session manager which starts all the other processes)
  • cinnamon (which is the visual part of the cinnamon desktop)
  • nemo-desktop (which handles the desktop icons and desktop context menu)
  • cinnamon-screensaver (the screensaver)
  • various csd-* processes (which are settings daemon plugins and run in the background)

The nemo process starts when you browse files and directories. It remains open as long as at least one file manager window is open.

The cinnamon-settings process starts when you launch the System Settings and remains open as long as at least one configuration module is open.

Libraries¶

cinnamon-menus¶

The cinnamon-menus library provides utility functions to read and monitor the set of desktop applications installed on the computer. Thanks to cinnamon-menus, Cinnamon can quickly list installed applications within the application menu, fetch application icons for the menu, the alt-tab selector and the window-list and keep this data in sync whenever applications are installed or removed from the computer.

The cinnamon-menus library is developed in C and the source code is available on Github.

cinnamon-desktop¶

cinnamon-desktop is a set of utility libraries and settings used by other Cinnamon components.

Whenever multiple desktop components need to access the same resource (whether this is a setting or a utility function), we place this resource in cinnamon-desktop.

Here’s an overview of some of the resources currently in cinnamon-desktop:

cinnamon.desktopdconf settings schemas used by several Cinnamon components
libcvcA PulseAudio utility library used to control sound volume and devices
gnomerrAn Xrandr utility library to detect, load and save monitor configurations
gnome-xkbA keyboard layout utility library
gnome-bgA wallpaper utility library
gnome-installerA cross-distribution library used to install software applications

The cinnamon-desktop library is developed in C and the source code is available on Github.

muffin¶

Muffin, or libmuffin to be more precise is a window management library.

Within the Cinnamon desktop environment, the Window Manager isn’t running in a separate process. The main cinnamon process implements the libmuffin library and therefore runs both the visible components (panel, applets..etc) and the window manager.

Note

Linux

The muffin package also provides a muffin binary. This binary is a small program which implements libmuffin and provides a minimal window manager, sometimes used by the developers as a troubleshooting tool. Note that whether or not muffin is installed by default in Linux Mint, it doesn’t run by default in a Cinnamon session. The cinnamon process, which also implements libmuffin, is the default window manager.

The clutter and cogl libraries are also part of the muffin package now. Clutter is a library for creating and displaying both 2d and 3d graphical elements. It is used both by muffin itself (eg. for compositing and setting up the stage), and also by St in cinnamon (all St widgets are clutter actors). Cogl is a library that clutter uses for 3d rendering.

Muffin is developed in C and the source code is available on Github.

cjs¶

CJS is Cinnamon’s Javascript interpreter. It uses MozJS (Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey) and makes it possible to work with GObject and interact with GIR, GNOME and Cinnamon libraries using that language.

CJS is run by and within the main cinnamon process and the parts of the desktop written in Javascript are contained in the main Cinnamon component.

CJS is developed in C++ and Javascript and the source code is available on Github.

Core components¶

cinnamon-session¶

The Cinnamon session manager is responsible for launching all the components needed by the session after you log in, and closing the session properly when you want to log out.

Among other things, the session manager launches the core components required by the session (such as the desktop itself and its components), as well as applications which are configured to start automatically.

Cinnamon-session also provides a DBus interface called the Presence interface, which makes it easy for applications such as media players to set the sessions as busy and inhibit power management (suspend, hibernate, etc…) and the screensaver during video playback.

Last but not least, the session management lets applications register so they can be closed cleanly. The text editor for instance is registered to the session when launched and interacts with it on logout. If a document isn’t saved, the session is aware of it and lets you save your work before proceeding to log out.

cinnamon-settings-daemon¶

cinnamon-settings-daemon is a collection of processes which run in the background during your Cinnamon session.

Here’s a description of some of these processes.

csd-automountAutomatically mounts hardware devices when they are plugged in
csd-clipboardManages the additional copy-paste buffer available via Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V
csd-housekeepingHandles the thumbnail cache and keeps an eye on the space available on the disk
csd-keyboardHandles keyboard layouts and configuration
csd-media-keysHandles media keys
csd-mouseHandles mice and touch devices
csd-orientationHandles accelerometers and screen orientation
csd-powerHandles battery and power management
csd-print-notificationsHandles printer notifications
csd-wacomHandles wacom devices
csd-xrandrHandles screen resolution and monitors configuration
csd-xsettingsHandles X11 and GTK configuration

Cinnamon-settings-daemon is developed in C and the source code is available on Github.

Visible desktop layer¶

cinnamon-screensaver¶

The Cinnamon screensaver is responsible for locking the screen and to a lesser extent for handling some power management functions (although most of these are handled by csd-power within the Cinnamon Settings Daemon).

Cinnamon-screensaver is developed in Python and the source code is available on Github.

cinnamon¶

The Cinnamon github project is the biggest and most active project within the overall project.

It contains various subcomponents written in C:

StCinnamon’s widget toolkit written on top of Clutter
AppsysAn abstraction of Gio.AppInfo and cinnamon-menus, providing metadata on installed applications
DocInfoAn abstraction of recently opened documents
TrayA small library for managing status icons

The visible layer of the desktop is written in Javascript:

Cinnamon JSThe panels, window management, HUD, effects and most of what you see…
AppletsThe applets within the panel
DeskletsThe desklets on top of the desktop

The System Settings, its configuration modules and utility scripts are written in Python.

Cinnamon is developed in C, Python and Javascript and the source code is available on Github.

nemo¶

Nemo is Cinnamon’s file manager. When you open up your home directory or browse files you’re running Nemo.

Another little part of Nemo is nemo-desktop. Its role is to handle desktop icons and the desktop context menu.

When you log in, nemo-desktop is started automatically by cinnamon-session. The nemo process itself only starts when you’re browsing through the directories and stops when you close the last opened file manager window.

Nemo is developed in C and the source code is available on Github.

nemo-extensions¶

Nemo provides a set of APIs and is very easy to extend, both in C and in Python. nemo-extensions is the Github project where common extensions are stored.

Some Nemo extensions are developed in C and some in Python. Their source code is available on Github.

cinnamon-control-center¶

Although cinnamon-settings (which is part of the Cinnamon project itself) and most of its modules are written in Python. A few configuration modules are still written in C.

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Note

Historically, when Cinnamon was forked from GNOME 3, all configuration modules were written in C, as part of gnome-control-center. At the beginning of the Cinnamon project, all configurations modules were thus written in C and were part of cinnamon-control-center. Since then the vast majority of modules were rewritten from scratch in Python and moved to the Cinnamon project itself.

Nowadays, only a few modules are still in cinnamon-control-center:

colorColor profiles
datetimeDate and Time configuration
displayDisplay and monitors configuration
networkNetwork configuration
online-accountsOnline Accounts configuration
wacomWacom devices configuration

Cinnamon-control-center is developed in C and the source code is available on Github.

in News

Now a days developers are focusing on improving the user interfaces of almost all devices, therefore, so many experiments are going on desktop interfaces designing too. Developers of Linux Mint are following the same trend and they are designing a new user interface for Linux Mint 13.

The older versions of Linux Mint were using Gnome environment but the upcoming versions will include Cinnamon whose version 1.2 was released 5 days ago.

We’re hoping Cinnamon will seduce most Linux Mint users, whether they’re coming from Gnome 2, Gnome Shell or other desktops. -Clement Lefebvre (Linux Mint creator)

Cinnamon seems to be a good conservative design which can compete with Gnome and KDE but still we will have to wait for the public response to see which one they like the most? Recently KDE 4.8 was also released. So at the moment there are 2 new desktop environments.

Lefebvre made Linux Mint after reviewing all the the other Linux distributions which were available in the open-source market and from that review he got some new ideas about what features should a ideal distribution should have? Then he made Linux Mint specifically for those folks who want a desktop operating system which is easy to use and require no or very little maintenance.

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He said:

We expect much more from our desktop than other distributions. We look at common use cases and if they fail to work out of the box or if they’re too complicated for the user, we identify it as a problem that needs fixing.

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Last year Ubuntu desktop were changed from Gnome to Unity interface by Canonical because they didn’t like unnecessary features of Gnome. Unity is an overlay for Gnome 3. Canonical is planning to advance its user interface even more by using “Head-Up Display” technology in the next release of Ubuntu.

While Canonical is constantly improving its interfaces, Linux Mint remains steadfastly committed to the traditional desktop. Desktop market is still ruled by Microsoft and Apple. Linux has much work to do to reach to that place.

Lefebvre said:

Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS dominate the desktop market with inferior products. There’s a huge potential for growth for Linux on the desktop market. Our core expertise is on the desktop, we’re not interested in smartphones, tablets and mobile devices.

Since Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu (which itself is based on Debian), so it is possible that Linux Mint would use Unity. This is not the case, however.

So far Unity is only used by one other distribution. It doesn’t look particularly interesting to us and there’s no demand for it. -Lefebvre

It is clear that Linux Mint team don’t want to continue to use Gnome 3. Gnome 3 asks folks to change the way they use their computers. It requires users to think about using the computer in terms of the applications they want to use rather than the tasks they want to complete. Nor does it multitask well. Linus Torvalds has already called Gnome 3 “an unholy mess“.

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Cinnamon follows traditional notions of how the desktop interfaces should look like. The interface has a slim panel which contains icons for applications, operational status report and basic commands. Users are allowed to place this icon panel along the top, or on the bottom, or you can have two panels for both the top and bottom.

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In the upcoming versions the users will be allowed to place this panel anywhere they want (on the desktop obviously). This approach is a notable contrast from Unity, the icon panel for which is affixed to the left-hand side of the screen.

Users can customize the look and feel of the desktop from “Cinnamon Settings”. They can choose different themes, desktop effects, can add new applets and extensions etc. Which is quite same as Gnome.

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Other than Cinnamon, Linux Mint 13 will feature Mate (another desktop), which puts a shell over Gnome 3 that presents an interface that replicates the experience of using Gnome 2.0. It is for those people who are used to the old interface or don’t have the enough system resources to run Cinnamon.

Below are some screenshots of Cinnamon, to see full size image just click on it:

Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon User Manual 2017

Not using Linux Mint? You can install Cinnamon on any distribution, check out this post.