Cinnamon is a Gnome-Shell desktop fork. It is not strictly a Gnome-2 interface, although the developers aims are laudable - to produce a simpler more traditional desktop interface.
Development seems to be rapid. It is usable and certainly fun to play with with a growing number of extensions to install to extend the base installation.
How to install
for 13.04 & 13.10, 14.10 & later
Cinnamon is now available in the Universe repository
cinnamon
Alternatively - from the command-line:
sudo apt-get install cinnamon-desktop-environment
Since it is in this repository, it is community maintained and thus it is up to the community to update the packages as and when new releases and bug-fixes are released.
For Ubuntu 14.04, there is currently no cinnamon packages in the Universe repository.
Via PPA for 11.10 and later
EDIT: 22/05/2014 - the PPA ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
has been removed or hidden from public view. I contacted the maintainer and the following is their reply:
The stable PPA is indeed no longer being maintained.
The nightly PPA is being kept for development purposes and should not
be used on any sort of production machine (it can and will break at
any time).
To be honest, I don't have an alternative to offer Ubuntu users at the
moment, apart from switching to a distribution that does support
Cinnamon. There are many such distributions out there, and I'm only
hoping for someone to (finally) step up on Ubuntu's side to provide
proper packages to its users.
EDIT: 25/04/14 - Two alternative PPA's have now been created - both claiming to enable the stable version of Cinnamon for Ubuntu users. I cannot vouch for the veracity of these PPAs
Option 1: 12.04 & 14.04 users only:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsvetko.tsvetkov/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
Option 2: 14.04 users only:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lestcape/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
As an alternative you may wish to consider the unstable nightly automatic builds - please note Gwendal's warning above:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
Option 3: In addition, you can also install cinnamon 2.2 in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and derivatives by adding Linux Mint 17 Qiana repository in your system.
Open file /etc/apt/sources.list
with nano command:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the following line at the end of file /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ qiana main upstream import
Update the repository then install the authentication key
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linuxmint-keyring
Update the repository again and install Cinnamon 2.2:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
After installation
Logout and select the Cinnamon session:
Enter you password and you'll see the Cinnamon desktop
... showing the traditional start type menu and applet design from Gnome-2
Extensions/Applets
The Cinnamon desktop uses the same philosophy as Gnome-Shell - functionality can be added to by installing Extensions & Applets.
Cinnamon uses its own Settings tool.
Cinnamon Settings
Cinnamon Applets
Similar to gnome-shell extensions - you can install applets from a dedicated Mint website.
I encountered this problem when upgrading from 12.10 to 13.04. No matter what I did, the VMware Tools installer couldn't seem to find the headers. For the record, here's how I installed the headers:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Turns out, the installer is looking for the version.h
file in under [kernelsource path]/include/linux/version.h
, it's not there. The location of version.h
is [kernelsource path]include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h
The solution is a symlink:
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/version.h
After creating this symlink, I was able to run the VMware Tools installer without a problem.
Best Answer
Because Linux Mint isn't related to Ubuntu the way Kubuntu and the like are, (Direct offshoots etc...) you unfortunately cannot install the Linux Mint environment on top of the Ubuntu DE like you can with say, Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu etc...You can do a second partition and install Linux Mint on that and subsequently choose between them at system boot with the GRUB menu but that's the extent of what you can do in regards to running Linux Mint on Ubuntu...