Ubuntu – Change “ Tweaks ” icon

OK, so after much experimentation I found a workaround, and a more permanent solution.

The Workaround

There were multiple issues, with separate solutions.

To solve the issue of the background being dark, I had to switch from the gnome greeter to lightdm:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3

...and then select lightdm. Now Cinnamon used the background from the greeter, which could be changed with the lightdm GTK+ greeter settings tool. This is not ideal, but it works.

To change the icon theme, I had to use the gnome tweak tool. I don't know why, but that correctly changed the icon theme.

As for the default keyboard shortcuts, I had to add them again. Instead of using the built in 'launch terminal' shortcut, I had to make a custom shortcut that ran gnome-terminal. Not ideal, but it works.

The Longer-Term Solution

I still don't know exactly which programs were causing these issues, but I figured that the cleaner the install I could do the better.

I reinstalled, this time with the minimal ubuntu installer. After that, I installed cinnamon, and enabled lightdm, using instructions from this answer.

sudo apt-get install cinnamon-desktop-environment
sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

in /etc/default/grub change the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash init=/lib/systemd/systemd"

and finally run

sudo update-grub

This gave me a working cinnamon install on Ubuntu. To get a nicer and more configurable greeter, I also installed the lightdm GTK+ greeter, and settings tool.

sudo apt-get install lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings