Tag Archives: cinnamon

OS

Fix inconsistent mouse cursors in Linux Mint

6 Comments

I love Linux Mint but a frustration of mine is the fact that the mouse cursors are inconsistent. If you change the mouse theme in the themes settings it will change for most windows, but certain windows such as chrome or wine revert to the system default mouse cursor.

I’ve finally found a fix courtesy of Ubuntu Forums. The problem lies with the x-cursor-theme being independent of the theme set in cinnamon. What you have to do is run a command to update the x-cursor-theme.

First, find the name of the mouse cursor you want from a list of your installed themes:

ls /usr/share/icons

Set an environment variable of the theme you want. Specify the folder name of the theme. For example, for DMZ-Black cursor:

CURSOR=DMZ-Black

Lastly run the command to update your cursor:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme "$CURSOR" && sudo update-alternatives --set x-cursor-theme /usr/share/icons/$CURSOR/cursor.theme

That’s it! You now have consistent mouse cursors. OCD demons satisfied.

OS

Install Cinnamon on a Wily chromebook chroot

4 Comments

I recently installed Ubuntu Wily Werewolf 15.10 as a chroot on my Chromebook Pixel 2. The process wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be so I will document it here.

First, I followed my own guide on how to set up a crouton chroot. The install would not complete – it was complaining about gnome-session-manager. I had to install the chroot with no GUI. This is the command I used (I specify a specific mirror to use because it’s much faster)

sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -r wily -t touch,extension,keyboard,cli-extra -e -n cinnamon -m http://mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu

Once the initial chroot was set up, I installed cinnamon:

sudo apt-get install cinnamon-desktop-environment

After all that was installed, I followed my own guide on configuring cinnamon. I placed the following script in /usr/local/bin/startcinnamon on my chromebook (not the chroot)

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a Mint session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "$0"`/enter-chroot" "$@" xinit

And I placed this file within the chroot, in my home directory:

echo "exec cinnamon-session" > ~/.xinitrc

I started by issuing the command

sudo startcinnamon

I noticed things didn’t look quite right. It turned out I was missing some icons.  Fix this by installing them:

sudo apt-get install gnome-icon-theme-full

I then discovered gnome-terminal wouldn’t run – it would simply crash on exit error 8. I discovered that it was due to missing locale settings. The fix was found here, which involves installing the gnome language pack and setting your locale.

sudo apt-get install language-pack-gnome-en
sudo update-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US"

To instigate the changes you must exit all chroot instances.

That was it! After that bit of tweaking I have an Ubuntu 15.10 chroot working pretty well on my Chromebook Pixel 2.

 

OS

Install Cinnamon on a Chromebook with Crouton

35 Comments

I really love using Crouton on my Chromebook Pixel LS 2015. I was sad to see that there is no cinnamon desktop environment target with the latest versions of crouton. Below is what I did to get Cinnamon on my chromebook. Much of what I did was taken from https://gist.github.com/sohjsolwin/5939948

  1. Create a base chroot
  2. Enter your chroot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsvetko.tsvetkov/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

Once Cinnamon was installed I needed to know how to start it manually. Thanks to the Arch Linux forums for explaining it. You have to create a .xinitrc file in your home directory within your chroot.

echo "exec cinnamon-session" > ~/.xinitrc

Trying to manually start cinnamon by typing startx didn’t work – I got a blank screen and had to hard reset to get anything to come back. Thanks to github I learned you need to use xinit instead of startx.

Lastly, we need to create a suitable startcinnamon script.

wget https://gist.github.com/sohjsolwin/5934362/raw/f68fc0942798902a0bd48f40c17dc0cd5cf585ea/startcinnamon

Modify the file to remove the startx command with xinit. Also remove everything after xinit. My file is as follows:

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a Mint session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "$0"`/enter-chroot" "$@" xinit

Make this file executable (chmod +x startcinnamon) and move it to the /usr/local/bin directory of your chromebook (not your chroot.) Now all you need to do is enter

sudo startcinnamon

and your cinnamon desktop should come up!

 

Update 2016-01-04

These two scripts seem to work a little bit better. Place this one within your chroot under /usr/local/bin/startcinnamon:

#!/bin/sh -e
# Copyright (c) 2015 The crouton Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

# Launches GNOME; automatically falls back to gnome-panel

exec crouton-noroot gnome-session-wrapper cinnamon

Place this one in /usr/local/bin outside your chroot (on your chromebook itself.)

#!/bin/sh -e
# Copyright (c) 2015 The crouton Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

set -e

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a GNOME session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "\`readlink -f "$0"\`"`/enter-chroot" -t cinnamon "$@" "" \
    exec startcinnamon