Cinnamon 1.2 Released | What’s New | Installation Instructions

January 24, 2012 in Applications, Download, How To?, News

Cinnamon is a new desktop environment, it’s forked from Gnome Shell and based on “Mutter” window manager and Gnome 3 desktop. Cinnamon desktop environment is developed by Linux Mint team. Finally Cinnamon desktop environment has reached a stable stage “Cinnamon 1.2″. So, Let’s check the what’s new in Cinnamon 1.2 and installation instruction in various Linux distributions.

Cinnamon 1.2 brings desktop effects and graphical user interface settings manager to easily customize your desktop elements and we will have a closer look to Cinnamon settings manager down below. Also Cinnamon become more stable and responsive even with enabling desktop effects, it works really good.

Cinnamon 1.2 Desktop Screenshot from Fedora 16 Verne

What’s New In Cinnamon 1.2

Desktop Layout: Ability to change the position of Cinnamon panel at the top or bottom of desktop or you can use panels at the top and bottom in the same time. “requires restart cinnamon”.
Auto hide the the panel.
Easily select between installed themes using the Cinnamon settings manager.
Enabling or disabling desktop effect and ability to customize the effect transitions.
Applets and extensions. Cinnamon 1.2 comes with 5 new applets “accessibility, recent documents, removable drives, trash, display settings applet”. Applets shows on the panel and you can activate or deactivate them using the cinnamon settings manager.
Better search method in cinnamon main menu. When you search for applications, the application categories become inactive in case you accidentally hovered the mouse cursor. Also by pressing enter after searching through the menu it will run the first application at the result menu.
Cinnamon now uses its own window manager (Muffin forks and replaces Mutter in Cinnamon 1.2).
Cinnamon is no longer compatible with Gnome Shell themes. It is possible however for a theme to define styles for both Gnome Shell and Cinnamon and to be compatible with both desktops.
Newly open windows are focused by default (instead of appearing in the back with an annoying “Your window is ready” notification)
Closing windows on an empty workspace no longer triggers the overview.
The overview was replaced by a desktop Scale plugin (similar to the old Compiz Scale). In future release, this plugin will be associated with CTRL+ALT+DOWN and a new Expo plugin will be mapped to CTRL+ALT+UP.
Bug fix galore (after this release, 130 issues were closed since the start of the project).

Cinnamon Settings Manager

After you change the layout option you have restart Cinnamon. Click ALT+F2 then type “r” without quotes to restart Cinnamon.

[How To]: Install Cinnamon 1.2

Linux Mint 12 Lisa

Cinnamon is already available on Mint local repository so you have to add additional repositories. You can install it by typing

sudo apt-get install cinnamon-session

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

Cinnamon 1.2 is available to install using repository PPA

Run terminal “Ctrl+ALT+t”, then type

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:merlwiz79/cinnamon-ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

PPA works on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin and Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

Fedora 16 Verne

Run terminal, then type

su
curl http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/leigh123linux/cinnamon/fedora-cinnamon.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-cinnamon.repo
yum install cinnamon

After the installation, logout, then select Cinnamon desktop from sessions menu and login.

For more download options check the official Download page for Cinnamon project.

Sources

Cinnamon 1.2 Release notes.

Cinnamon Download Page.

Installation guide for Cinnamon on Fedora 16 Verne.

Cinnamon Official page.

About the author

Mohamed Hussein "mhnassif" is the founder of LinuxNov project.

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the old rang #

There is, it seems, in Cinnamon, a irritating hot spot in the upper left corner.
I thought it might be residual garbage from some launcher attempt.

I would truly love to know how to disable it, without getting too irritated with your
software attempts. the spot is, for all intents and purposes, just to irritate
people that move the bar from bad location on bottom, to good location on top.

Reply
- mhnassif #
  
  Open Cinnamon settings, then beneath “overview” tab, uncheck the “overview hot corner enabled”. That’s it.
  
  Reply
John Cartwright #

This desktop environment seems to be a nice alternative to the Gnome Shell desktop and the default Linux Mint 12 desktop environment. The desktop effects are unobtrusive and fast as well. This is light years ahead of the Unity desktop that Ubuntu is lumbered with.

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