Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a traditional and modern desktop environment: traditional desktop metaphor as Gnome 2, LXDE or Xfce, with very good graphical and functional features. It is forked from Gnome Shell and developed for Linux Mint. It is provided for Gentoo as a Gnome package: gnome-extra/cinnamon.

Without Systemd
Cinnamon works great without systemd. For that, eselect a profile without Gnome, as this one: default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop (platform and version can be different). To get system profiles list:

Then to set the system profile:

Set profile complete name as in example, or profile number according to profiles list.

Also, follow the Gentoo Without Systemd wiki page instructions.

With Systemd
For Cinnamon with systemd, eselect either the default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/gnome/systemd profile for system-wide systemd, or default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/gnome for Gnome systemd dependencies. The platform and version can be different.

Installing
Of course, Xorg must be first installed for Cinnamon to work.

Cinnamon needs some USEflags:  and. Add them to the system's file:

You also can set them just for Cinnamon install, see below.

For Cinnamon, and other applications to be translated to a specific language, add the appropriate language to the :

Cinnamon will need a few other packages in order to work properly:, , and.

So, let's go to install!

If  and   were added to :

If not added:

Compilation duration can be very long: net-libs/webkit-gtk, one or the many Cinnamon dependencies, takes about eight hours to compile with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, more than one hour with an Intel quad cores i7 processor with hyper-threading.

Services
Xorg server and Cinnamon need the dbus and consolekit services, Cinnamon needs NetworkManager, add them at boot time:

Running these services before restart:

Sudo
For an ordinary user to reboot or shutdown, sudo is needed with some settings. First install :

Next modify sudo's configuration with the visudo command:

Visudo runs the default text editor with sudoers file, add for a named user:

Or for the  group users:

Polkit Rules and Actions
For an ordinary user to perform root only actions, put a javascript file in, for example named ( already exists).

Get the list of actions with pkaction, their names are quite self-explanatory:

To authorize an user belonging to  group to suspend, hibernate, shutdown and restart from Cinnamon:

All needed actions can be added to change color profiles, use nano (Cinnamon files manager) as root, mount and eject medias, set screen backlight, use network manager, change wallpaper etc. Just don't make javascript mistakes…! Several  blocks can be used.

Another simpler way is to authorize all actions by only testing  group membership:

More detailed explanations in polkit Reference Manual, particularly polkit page.

Starting Cinnamon
When not using a login/display manager, make a file in the user's home directory with this content:

Then to start Xorg and Cinnamon, once logged in:

With a display manager follow their wiki pages instructions.

Mint-X Icons
By default Cinnamon comes with gnome icons. Mint-X icons are on GitHub. Download, unzip and put the desired icon set in, then make a cache for it (sample for Mint-X icons, there are also colored sets with other names like ):

Desktop Icons Text Color
Icon's text color in Cinnamon desktop is grey by default, not very readable.

Cinnamon 2.2.16
Get white text by adding css rules in (Adwaita is the default theme coming with Cinnamon install):

The 2nd rule concerns selected desktop icons and can be modified to get others background color or transparency.

Cinnamon 2.4.6
Adwaita is now the default GTK+ theme, rules can't be added in it's directory. They must be set in user's home:, without @import line. Aditionally in this example left Nemo side bar is grey colored.

Debugging
If problems launch Xorg server via ssh to get live error messages. More messages with  parameter for cinnamon-session:

Alternatively you can have a look at.

If Cinnamon can't launch, deleting in your home directory is not enough, other Cinnamon or Gnome (as dconf) items must be deleted too before X restart, in directories. can be entirely deleted.

Installing common applications
Some usual Gnome, or not Gnome applications install.

Terminal
Lxterminal requires no dependencies, gnome-terminal needs systemd, mate-terminal should install all Mate desktop environment.

Others
For example calculator, screen copy utility, pictures, PDF display, system monitor, archive manager…