Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a contemporary desktop environment with a traditional interface that Gnome 2, LXDE or Xfce users will find easy to work with. Cinnamon has very good graphical and functional features. Forked from Gnome Shell and developed for Linux Mint, it is available for the and  architectures.

Prerequisites
Cinnamon works great both with and without systemd. To install without systemd dependencies, use to switch to a profile without Gnome, such as. To install with systemd, use a Gnome-enabled profile such as. The architecture and version can be different in both cases.

To get a list of available system profiles:

OpenRC
When using OpenRC, set the right system profile:

It is also possible to use the associated profile number according to the profiles list above:

Read up on the instructions available in the Gentoo Without Systemd article.

Systemd
For Cinnamon with systemd support select the GNOME desktop profile ending in systemd:

Xorg
Of course for Cinnamon to work properly Xorg must be installed and configured correctly. Make sure it is working properly before proceeding with this article. If needed, test Xorg as detailed in the Using startx section of the Xorg Gentoo guide.

Cinnamon (and other applications) are internationalized, supporting a number of languages (Linguas). If this was not done during the initial Gentoo installation, add the appropriate language value to the LINGUAS variable in :

It is advised to install and  as it makes the Cinnamon experience more complete.

Two USE flags,  and , are needed by Cinnamon's dependencies. If they are not set already, either allow to create or update  (or ) itself, or set the USE flags manually.

Emerge
Finally, after performing all the steps above, ask Portage to emerge Cinnamon:

System configuration
Before looking at the Cinnamon theming, configure the system to properly start Cinnamon at boot or upon user request, and enable the right privilege delegation settings so that end users can interact with the system in an intuitive manner.

Services
Xorg server and Cinnamon need the and  services. The next set of instructions show how to deal with OpenRC. With systemd use as detailed in the systemd page.

Make sure that the right services are started at system boot time:

Next, start the services (there is no need to restart the system):

NetworkManager is a Cinnamon dependency and is not needed if the network was configured during the initial Gentoo installation. It should not run concurrently with another network service. If NetworkManager is desired be sure to disable other network management programs or services before starting it. For example, if the system was originally configured to use Gentoo's netifrc scripts to manage the network connections, disable these network services:

After removing the other network services, add NetworkManager:

Sudo
For an ordinary user to reboot or shutdown the system from Cinnamon, is needed with some settings.

First install :

Next modify the configuration with the  command:

Visudo runs the default text editor to generate or update a file. Replace  in the text below with the username of each user that will be using Cinnamon:

Or for the wheel group:

Polkit rules and actions
For an ordinary user to perform additional highly privileged actions from Cinnamon, policy kit must be configured. Use to get a list of actions; the names should be self-explanatory:

The simplest way is to authorize all actions by only testing wheel group membership. Put a JavaScript file in, named for example :

To only authorize some actions, the action names must be iterated. For a wheel group user to suspend, hibernate, shutdown and restart the system, make a file like so:

Various actions can be added: those to change color profiles, use Nemo (Cinnamon files manager) as root, mount and eject media, set screen backlight, use network manager, change wallpaper, etc. Several  blocks can be used next to each other as well.

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

Then to start Xorg and Cinnamon, execute after logging in:

With a display manager follow the display manager instructions.

Mint-X icons
By default Cinnamon comes with Gnome icons. Mint-X icons are on GitHub. Download, unzip, and put the Mint-X icon set in :

Next, make a cache for it:

The new icon set can be selected in Cinnamon Control Center. Mint-X icons are green, but other icon sets with different colors can be installed too, like Mint-X-Grey or Mint-X-Orange. Make sure to create a cache for these as well.

Desktop icons text color
An icon's text color in Cinnamon desktop is black by default, which is not always readable. The instructions to change this color depends on the GTK+ 3 version that the system is using. Get the currently used version with:

GTK+ < 3.13.3
In older GTK+ versions, this setting can only be changed system-wide. Change the text color by adding CSS rules to the file (Adwaita is the default theme coming with GTK+), after the   line:

The 2nd rule concerns the selected desktop icon and can be modified to get another background color or set the transparency.

GTK+ >= 3.13.3
In more recent GTK+ versions, this must be tuned through a user-specific configuration file. Adwaita is now included in GTK+ as the theme replacing Raleigh, so rules must be set in the user's home directories. The file to edit is, and the change is now without the  line. Additionally in this example, the left Nemo side bar is gray colored:

Mint-X themes
Cinnamon comes with a default cinnamon theme, obviously... The Mint-X themes are available for download on GitHub. Download them, unzip, and copy to if needed. They can be selected in the Cinnamon Control Center.

Playing with themes
Almost all theme settings can be changed in the file in the theme directory.

For example with the Cinnamon theme, which is not in but in, first copy the theme's directory to a user  sub-directory, named for example , which will be the new theme name:

Edit. The results of the changes can be viewed immediately by selecting another theme then reselecting the theme being changed.

Terminals

 * - Requires no dependencies.
 * - Requires some dependencies but is better featured than.
 * Requires systemd.

Other popular applications
A number of popular applications are available as well, often built for Gnome but working flawlessly in Cinnamon.


 * standard calculator
 * screen copy utility
 * image viewer
 * PDF reader
 * system monitor
 * archive manager
 * disk burning
 * text editor

Troubleshooting
If problems occur, try to get access to the live error messages. These can be displayed on a separate (virtual) terminal or in a log file. If the messages cannot be found, try starting Cinnamon from the command line rather than through a display manager. Alternatively have a look at.

When the error or warning messages are not sufficient to troubleshoot Cinnamon, start it with the  parameter:

If Cinnamon cannot launch, deleting (or renaming) in the home directory is not enough: other Cinnamon or Gnome items must be deleted (or renamed) too before X restarts. These can be found in the XDG directories, and. can be deleted (or renamed) entirely.

External resources

 * polkit Reference Manual and polkit page.
 * The web colors Wikipedia article.
 * An extensive Gnome applications list.
 * Cinnamon announcements.