Several things there are crying out to be customized. Then there is a large blank space which is a safe bet to be a window list / taskbar, At the right end of the panel are some monitors and controls and a clock. Starting from the left end, there is a Menu button, the Show Desktop button, and a group of three common application launchers. Next up is the Panel that spans the bottom of the screen. With that out of the way, I'm ready to continue as before. Change that to Two Finger Scrolling, and the world is a wonderful place (at least for me). On the Touchpad page, in the Scrolling section is the item I am looking for, Panel Layout, which is initially Edge Scrolling. That will show you the Mouse and Touchpad menu entry, select that and you will get the Mouse and Touchpad control window. So let's change that.Ĭlick on the Mint Menu icon at the left end of the panel, then type touch in the search bar. Linux Mint is the only distribution of the six or seven that I use regularly which still defaults to "Edge Scrolling" on the touchpad. I am going to deviate briefly from the order that I did things with the previous desktops, to fix something that is going to drive me insane otherwise (yes, I know, that would be a short drive). to get a window where I can set the font size, which has the effect of setting the clock size. I can click-and-drag it to wherever I really want it to be located, and I can right-click on it and choose Configure. For illustration purposes I am simply going to add a simple digital Clock to the desktop all I have to do is select it and then click Add to desktop. Selecting that menu item brings up the Desklets control, with a list of available desklets. You might not be familiar with the term desklets, but it doesn't take too much imagination to figure out that it is probably some sort of an applet that lives on the desktop. Just above the background change item, there's an interesting-looking one called Add Desklets. Let's go back and pick up one other item from the desktop menu above. Turning slideshow mode on tells Cinnamon to use all of the images from whatever directory is selected, and includes options for the length of time each image is displayed, and whether the images should be displayed sequentially or in random order.Īgain, other than the specific layout and terminology used in this control, this is all pretty much the same as it was in Xfce and KDE - and it was missing in Gnome 3. When I click Settings, it changes to this window, which shows that it is currently only using a single image for wallpaper (the slideshow is Off). The screen that is shown here is Images, and if I click one of them it will immediately become the wallpaper - there is no "Accept" or "OK" button. You can add more directories to the list by clicking the "+" button at the bottom of the list.Īt the top of the window there are buttons for Images and Settings. The Backgrounds utility presents you with a list of wallpapers grouped by the Linux Mint release (by name) in which they appeared, and your own Pictures directory. There are some other interesting items on this menu, I will come back and look at a few of those later. One of the items in that menu is Change Desktop Background, so that's the obvious choice. When I right-click anywhere on the desktop background, the desktop options menu comes up. Let's start with something simple, the same way that we did with the previous desktops - changing the wallpaper. That also looks pretty familiar now, a categorized menu with a favorites area, shutdown/reboot buttons and a search box at the top. If I click on the Menu at the left end of the bottom panel, it brings up the application menu. The panel contains a menu and some icons, controls and monitors. There is a desktop wallpaper (background), with a couple of icons on it, and a panel which spans the bottom of the screen. That looks pretty typical, along the lines of the Xfce and KDE desktops at least. The initial Cinnamon 2.8 desktop on Mint 17.3 looks like this: Now it is time for the Cinnamon desktop.Īs with the previous posts, I want to make sure that I am using the latest release and that it is well integrated with the Linux distribution, so this time I will be using Cinnamon 2.8 on Linux Mint 17.3 Beta (to be very specific, it is Cinnamon 2.8.5 at the time of this writing, once all available updates have been installed).
So far in this series of 'How to customise your Linux desktop' blogs, I have looked at Xfce, KDE and Gnome 3.