Cinnamon 2.4 available for beta-testing in Linux Mint 17

A brand new version of Cinnamon is out and it will be featured in the upcoming release of Linux Mint 17.1 at the end of the month.

For a quick look at its new features, please read the official announcement: Cinnamon 2.4

In the next two weeks we’ll be using your feedback to improve Cinnamon and to fix eventual bugs in preparation for the next Linux Mint release.

If you want to help beta-test the new desktop (beware: There will be bugs, there always are bugs in new releases, that’s why we leave a month between the releases of Cinnamon and Linux Mint), you can upgrade Cinnamon to version 2.4.0 by following the instructions below:

  • Launch Menu->Administration->”Software Sources”.
  • Tick the option “Unstable Packages (Romeo)”.
  • Carefully read the warning in the dialog that pops up and click “Yes” if appropriate.
  • Launch the Update Manager and click on “Refresh”.
  • If a new mintupdate version is shown, apply it.
  • Apply all updates related to Cinnamon (sort by version, 2.4.0 or 2.4.1, or by update type since they all come from Romeo).

Enjoy, don’t take unnecessary risks (this will be all completely stable in less than a month) and don’t forget to send us your feedback 😉

59 comments

  1. Thanks, looks cool!

    Once Mint 17.1 is out, can we get the stable version easilly?

    Where to report bugs? Github or Launchpad or a comment here or…?

    Is there already a list of know bugs to be award of before installing?

    Looking forward to it.

    Edit by Clem: Please comment here or on Segfault for feedback. Regarding bugs, there are some translations missing in the new Network Settings (we’re also planning on globally reviewing them) and there’s a bug which makes Nemo freeze when unmounting an HDD with two partitions on it (we’re aware of it and trying to fix it at the moment). Other than that there are known issues with GTK 3.14 we’re looking at. Once 17.1 is out as a stable release we’ll open up an upgrade path from 17 (people will be notified and able to upgrade easily from within the OS, probably via an upgrade to mintupdate or mintsources).

  2. Hi,
    Let me begin by saying I use Arch Linux, it is possible not all issues noted below are related to cinnamon but because I use the latest software.
    A followup on my comment here: http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2014/11/cinnamon-2-4/#comment-115705
    I am not sure is this bug is because of some design choises the Gnome developers made or if it is a bug in Cinnamon. I currently do not have a pure Gnome 3.14 desktop running, so am unable to test it. I also am not sure if Gnome 3.14 is themable at all.

    Lets start with some compliment::
    – ‘Cinnamon 2.4 received many little improvements’
    This really means a lot to me! The desktop is definitely more smooth. Thank you!
    – ‘Modules are sorted alphabetically’.
    Hallelujah!
    – Being able to reach the favorites and logout+shutdown button with the keyboard is a big plus.
    – ‘Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.’
    This was one of my shortcuts, but thanks anyway 🙂
    – Thank you for network profile support! But what program is linked to the ‘Firewall Zone’? Apparently ufw and gufw are not… or am I missing something? I have the 3 default gufw profiles.
    – The folder emblems are nice. Never used(/seen) them before but soon probably will.

    A couple of small bugs:
    – Note to users, when you upgrade to Cinnamon 2.4, all your custom keyboard shortcuts are removed… I only had 3 so no problem for me 🙂

    – During login and when you ask the preferences in nemo the transision effect (fade in) is slightly corrupted, it extremely briefly shows a horizontal bar that looks like a chessboard only with all sorts of colors.
    Other programs don’t have these problems, is seems to be isolated to login and nemo. For example the fade effect the settings menu has during startup is fine. Well, it is slow but no corruption…

    Not related to the 2.4 update but still:
    – When you hover over a folder, it gives a tool-tip with the name, size etc. When you hover over to another folder, the tool-tip is very briefly shown in the most upper left corner of the screen below the panel (mine is at the top) and then is displayed correctly in the right below corner of the folder. It keeps flashing like this as you hover. Not that much of an issue but it can be annoying.

    Then a couple of comment on some design choises:
    – I am not sure what to think of the new theme configuration. There is a lot of wasted space on the right side, maybe place the options horizontally. The preview is nice, but if you have a lot of icons or themes installed the preview blocks a large section of the screen.
    Also themes will need to be updated to support this preview, I have a lot of ‘missing icon’ icons.

    – I think the new ‘auto-hide panel’ option on right click is unnecessary. Use panel settings, is that so hard?

    – Could you please give the system settings program a fixed size? It is really annoying having it going smaller, wider, larger. It becomes a REAL pain in the but if you use mouse focus.

    – The ‘Windows’ settings is way to large, please use tabs. Also related to the above.

    – The ‘Sound’ settings should have a scroll bar in the ‘Play sound through’ if necessary. My sound devices’ name is more than 30 characters and the ‘Settings for ***’ menu is only displayed about haf. Yes there is a scroll bar at the bottom but it resets every time I switch tabs. Also the sound volume bar in ‘Applications is unnecessary long, it is as wide as the entire settings menu…

    – Same goes for the ‘Date & Time’ settings, it could be way thinner. The unlock button is 2x the size of my index finger. Literary.

    – Then there is ‘Networking’. It isn’t optimized for the increased size yet, because of the profiles. The window start way to small. Could you also make it possible to scroll when your mouse is hovering a profile? Right now you can only scroll using the small sidebars between the network types and the scroll bar.

    – There are desklets, extensions, themes and applets, but no consistent way to update them. You have to go to each thing, click on ‘Available ***’, refresh the list and realize that there are 5 more to check.

    – Explain the settings as you hover over them. I still don’t know what the workspace OSD does and I don’t want to have to click on everything just to find out what is does.

    – I very much like the new background changer, but please include folder recursion, or make it possible to select multiple folders.

    – Note to icon developers, updates are necessary. At least the logout and shutdown button are different (read wrong).

    – Maybe merge the desktop and backgrounds settings? And themes and desklets with it? Use tabs. Now the ‘preferences’ section is way to large.

    – The ‘general’ settings is mostly obsolete. Include desktop scaling and compositing in ‘Display’ or ‘Desktop’, LookingGlass under something like ‘System Info’.

    ———
    Jeroen

    Edit by Clem: Thanks for the feedback Jeroen, we’ll try to make some of the changes you mentioned in 2.6. Regarding tooltips, that’s an issue in GTK itself. It’s easy to fix, you can ask the Arch maintainers to apply the following patch if they’re ok with patching GTK: https://github.com/linuxmint/gtk/commit/15c956a2efc50b6a980077a789143ad53d07f354

  3. Amazing! Thanks so much. I’m finally dumping Arch and switching to Mint with this update.

    Edit by Clem: Thanks Edgar. You can run Cinnamon 2.4 in Arch though.

  4. Great to see this hit the streets. Could you clarify how to get the emblems working though ? There is no nemo-emblems package in the Rebecca repository

    Edit by Clem: Sorry about this. nemo-emblems and nemo-pastebin were missing, they were added today.

  5. Can you please make Cinnamon Menu resizable, the ability to select or deselect pictures in background slideshows, the ability to receive email notifications on the desktop and the ability to remove the Lock,Log Off, Power from cinnamon menu please. Using Cinnamon 2.4.

  6. Curious, once we update to the new Cinnamon beta in Mint 17, should we then “uncheck” romeo in software sources or leave it checked?

    Edit by Clem: Hi Mike, it’s up to you. If you don’t want more unstable updates, disable it. We’ll be pushing fixes for 2.4 in there though, but then again.. you’ll get these no matter what when upgrading to 17.1.

  7. As a followup to my previous post (#2):
    The bug with the transition effect corruption on login is much worse with Gnome 3.14. I tested it in one of my virtual machines with Gnome 3.14 and the desktop become very bright and if you right click the desktop and then left click you can still see the menu vaguely in the background, like it is imprinted on it. However, changing the desktop background directly after login solves this issue completely, with nemo to. Really strange.
    The menus in Evince and Gedit are still unreadable.

  8. I am afraid that mobile broadband has broken and needs some attention. https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3640

    Edit by Clem: Thanks Simon. I left my 3G dongle in Ireland.. if I can’t catch anyone in the dev. team to reproduce this I’ll go to the shop and get a new one. We’ll look into it either way, it’s been added to the roadmap for 17.1. PS: Can you confirm you’re able to work your way through and get things to work using the “Network Connections” tool?

  9. In my 64 bit version of LM17 updating cinnamon-translations 2.2.3+qiana to 2.2.4 caused hibernation to fail. Will this be addressed in the upgrade

  10. Hi there!
    I found a problem in volume keys, i try to assign (as usual) f8 key for volume up but is impossible if i pressed it the side bar of a window -nemo for example- have been highlighted.
    There’s any solution about it ?

    Thanks and regards.

  11. Thanks for the hint Clem. If I use the network connections tool to create a new connection then I can connect to it just fine.

  12. Hi, this update is amazing. My only problem are all the keyboard shortcuts broken. Volume up don’t work. CTRL alt t not open the terminal. And the animation of the startup is okay, but start drawing the icons at the bottom and after a few seconds they jump to your original position? Clement thanks for your hard work, I love Linux mint.

  13. Note: in this post, in the instructions to upgrade, could you add the step in capital letter below? Cost me a bit of head scratching to find why I wasn’t seeing any updates.

    * Launch Menu->Administration->”Software Sources”.
    – SELECT MIRROR Main: http://packages.linuxmint.com
    * Tick the option “Unstable Packages (Romeo)”.

  14. Very smooth effects all over and the GUI feels way more reactive. Programs seem to open MUCH faster (Nemo just jumps at you!)

    No regressions found so far.

    It seems to take longer for Cinnamon to load and the PC to be usable though.

    One issue is still present:
    After waking up the PC from sleep or rebooting, the external sound device (ex: USB headphone) is not shown in the sound applet.
    https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/2888

    Thanks!

  15. ALL current 32b LM17/LMDE 201403UP8/SolydX 201407/Kali 1.07 LiveDVD are currently useless for me on Nforce2 Ultra 400 based mobos with AMD Athlon XP “Barton” and either Radeon 9600 VIVO 128MB (black screen instead of Kernel parameter option menu) and/or freeze-up as soon as the boot messages end, the prompt briefly appears and the system then switches into GUI mode.

    What is going on lately with Linux? Where is the basic and essential VESA compatibility to get a LiveDVD up and running on virtually any hardware?
    Additionally, waking up from suspend, which was working with last summer’s LM LiveDVDs, is now broken and ends up in a blank frozen screen.

    Will this new release be useable again on my hardware, which is nothing exotic at all, but was very widespread some 11 years ago, or is Linux now even pickier than Windows and people have to buy new hardware with every other release cycle?

  16. Forgot to add, the other system’s graphics adapter is a Radeon X800 GTO AGP (R420), experiencing the same freeze ups.
    Why do new Linux releases always seem to break essential stuff, that was working before?

    Edit by Clem: I’m not entirely sure this applies to you, but if it’s to do with AMD moving support for older GPUs to its legacy driver and not maintaining it properly (i.e. not releasing new drivers for new versions of Xorg), you should blame ATI, not Linux. It’s not like anyone is able to maintain their drivers for them… the source code isn’t available. If they don’t do it, nobody else can.

  17. It is true ??

    source: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2825255/opensource-subnet/better-know-an-os-linux-mint-17-1-qiana.html

    I will not be using Mint Linux, The way they provide their images is extremely insecure.

    First they do not sign their hashes with a private key. Next the hashing algorithm needs to be SHA256, not MD5.

    You could verify the signature of the hashes with a public key, if mint would provide one, and be 100% sure the hash came from mint and then hash the iso.

    if mint would would sign their hashes and use SHA256 I would be using mint now.

    Edit by Clem: The half that is true should explain why that signature is important, the way it’s written it just sounds over-dramatic (I’ll try to explain it in simple terms: The only way you know the ISO is legit is because you can check its md5/sha256 on linuxmint.com, torrents.linuxmint.com and blog.linuxmint.com. If someone was to hack into these 3 servers, he/she could modify the ISO, edit the md5/sha256 files and regenerate the torrent. Of course people would notice easily for the torrent, and also for the ISOs after a little while since the announcements are basically copied/translated over all over the web. Now, if that ISO was signed on the other hand, the person would have to hack the signature key and that’s much harder to do in theory. Of course he could simply replace the signed ISO with an unsigned one and to be honest I’m not sure people checking for signatures would notice faster than people reporting a torrent tracker mismatch.) The other half of the comment isn’t true at all (http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/stable/17/sha256sum.txt). Now with that said, we are thinking about adding a signature file (i.e. to sign the ISO.. no matter the limitations and what it actually addresses, it doesn’t cost us anything to do so, so it’s already been agreed we would), and we’re looking at the best way to communicate our public signature key (without which nobody can verify our signature :)).

  18. The best way to distribute your key would be via as many routes as possible. Firstly, make it available to other major distributors via their keyservers, eg Fedora’s keyserver (https://keys.fedoraproject.org/), and your own site using https.

    If you can mail or hand the key over in person, or ring over the phone, better still. An existing mint install, when fetching a new iso, should verify this key. This allows you to chain trust.

    Of course a new user has no protection, other than your/redhat’s certificate. You could set up an avahi-like service to broadcast keys between linux mint installs on a local network – this would avoid certificate forgery attacks to cross-check keys with one another, but could open up false positives if a false key is published, and wont provide protection against an already owned install (which you can’t protect against anyway).

    Edit by Clem: We can use the same key as the one used to sign the repositories (which is already available via the Ubuntu keyservers and present in linuxmint-keyring). Would that help?

  19. PS, SHA hashes on the main site would help too – MD5 is broken to the point where you can fake an existing hash with a different binary.

    Edit by Clem: MD5 is mostly used as a quick way to detect corrupted downloads. It’s the sha256sums.txt we’d sign once we agree on the distribution of the public key.

  20. @ #18
    Thanks Clem. I am not sure either. I assumed that VESA compatibility uses a standardized API, independent of the actual graphics hardware it is running on.
    LM16 MATE 32b is the last one still booting up on those nForce2 based Athlon XPs.
    Weirdly enough however, all those Live-Media distris that now cause so much problems on those boards, still work fine on my old mobile Athlon XP based laptop with integrated Radeon IGP 320 (RS100) chipset.

    I never used any proprietary graphics drivers before anyway on with a Live medium that’s no option anyway to the best of my knowledge.
    Isn’t the regular generic Linux Radeon driver some reverse-engineered bit, that should continue to cover legacy hardware like the Radeon 9600 and Radeon X800 GTO (R420) anyway?

    Edit by Clem: I don’t want to give you any false hopes as I’m not sure it will solve the issue, but a few things changed between Qiana and Rebecca: kernel is at -37, mesa is at 10.1.3 and X drivers were updated to include this fix https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/1301839. So it might work better (or not at all), but it will be worth a try.

  21. Yes! In the update of today all the keyboard shortcuts work again! My only bug is in the startup animation. The desktop icons start at the bottom and they “jump” to the original position on 2 or 3 seconds (on intel i5 3210m with 8gb of ram). But is a graphical minimal detail. Excellent work Clem.

    Edit by Clem: Yes, we fixed the keybindings. For the animation though, it’s tricky… to be honest I’m not quite sure how to fix it. On some GPUs it works flawlessly (I can only reproduce it myself in Virtualbox). Note: that’s the reason we added the ability to turn the startup animation OFF in the system settings.

  22. Thanks for the update.

    One thing to complain:
    Some of the applications don’t show a minimized icon in the system tray, e.g. the instant messenger pidgin, spotify client and amarok.

    Is this a cinnamon problem or is this the fault of other GUI libs?

    regards,
    tobe

  23. I like the new version of Cinnamon – good stuff. Two things, though.

    (1) I can’t see exactly where to enable the startup animation.

    (2) Might it be a good idea to change the phrase ‘all settings’ in system settings to something like ‘Back’ or ‘Back to all settings’? As things stand, I tend to read that text as a *label*, i.e. as something telling me – falsely – that I am *presently* looking at all settings. Just my tuppence-worth.

  24. “Edit by Clem: MD5 is mostly used as a quick way to detect corrupted downloads. It’s the sha256sums.txt we’d sign once we agree on the distribution of the public key.”

    I think we disagree on what is to be protected against, but both understand the issue. Upgrading to SHA has almost no drawbacks vs MD5, and adds protection against tampering (deliberate corruption), unlike MD5, which only protects against non-deliberate corruption.

    Yes, signing with the repo key would be fantastic.

    Edit by Clem: I signed the sha256sum for stable/17 and testing, it’s syncing right now. Let me know if that works ok.

  25. Huh, everything was working perfectly for me, I did the upgrade following this blog post, and now I get repeated cinnamon has crashed and now in fallback pop up. I’m in fallback mode now. Going to try to change gfx drivers and see if that helps.

  26. Yep, just tried multiple configurations and reboots, all fail. Is there a log file I can get you guys, or? fglrx and xserver drivers seemed to change nothing, is there a place to wipe out my cinnamon config? Deleting themes now, futzing with cinnamon stuff….

  27. Figured it out: I had to follow the instructions EXACTLY. I couldn’t apt update && apt upgrade from the term like I normally do. I’ll report if I find any bugs!

  28. Hello.
    I have tried Cinnamon 2.4 just a few minutes ago.
    Start-up is successful.
    A notification says that “Some applications especially desktop applications and some plugs failed.”
    Everything is OK now.
    I saw that system became faster after upgrading the Cinnamon 2.4.
    Waiting for the Cinnamon 17.1 Rebecca.
    Bye.

  29. Hi Mint team,

    The Cinnamon Desktop has been my favorite since I used Maya and then moved to Ubuntu with Cinnamon. Am back to Mint when I heard Mint will have internal upgrades supported until next LTS, which I think is fabulous.

    About 2.4, Nemo works better. I loved the new simpler theme-ing options with other colored icons.
    The only issues I noticed are –
    a> It boots slower than Cinnamon 2.2, maybe due to some zoom feature. Would love if it comes with an option to disable.
    b> When the screen locks for a long time and I log back in, Cinnamon restarts. Not too big a problem either.

    I am using 64 bit on an A4 Laptop.

    Would love the stable Cinnamon 2.4. Looking forward to it,

    Thanks.

  30. And oh, sorry, another issue –

    The wavy wifi icon in the tray is replaced by a LAN icon. I love my wifi icon. but not a big problem

  31. We can customize the notifications?
    Where I can see all startup applications?

    The colors are cute and would be great to allow users to customize the Deskbar

    For me everything is fine. Thank you.

  32. Hello, I am using the new Cinnamon 2.4.
    The Window Decorations are “old” was good to have new Mint-X Window Decoration.Thank you!.Mário Alberto.

  33. kenden Says:
    Regression: In Nemo, when renaming or creating a new document or folder, the input field for the name is misplaced.
    https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/757

    I can confirm this, the same here.
    Also, after some time, my wallpaper gets messed up with random colors. The wallpaper is the default one red-pink that came with 17. Will try to snapshot it next time it happens.

  34. Is there any way yet in Cinnamon to change the panel bumpmap and make that change stick (not vanish every time anything in the system updates)?
    I would love to see something under the Preferences (System Settings) icons to tweak Cinnamon settings, including the bumpmap feature.
    I ask as I cannot find any such Cinnamon tool and I’m not a noob (25+ years Unix servers). In Mint style, is it possible to make this simple and ‘just works’?
    Thanks to all on the dev and test teams. Mint rocks!! I am so so eager to see Rebecca 17.1.

  35. Hey Team,

    I had shared 3 bugs right after rhy after number 32 –
    It was awaiting moderation status. I had confirmed it was not a repeated entry. Yet these comments have disappeared with no explanation. No email received either. What Gives?

    Anyways – reiterating
    1> Cinnamon restarts after an unlock after long lock time on screen.
    2> Boot time significantly higher than Cinnamon 2.2 (with start up animation enabled and some bug with the zoom)
    3> Wifi icon is changed (the wavy icon replaced by the link icon usually reserved for LAN)

    Using 64 bit Mint 17 on an AMD A4 – 5000 laptop with Radeon 8330, stock kernel (all updates applied), fglrx driver.

    Hopefully this gets posted or get a reason for not posting

    Regards

  36. Installed on Mint 17 KDE, Cinnamon is running smooth and faster than KDE,But please update KDE to 4.14.X also.
    Will report bugs if i found. Nice work Mint Team 🙂

  37. Hi guys good job every thing working great,running smooth here,love cinnamon 2.4 can wait to upgrade to 17.1

    cinnamon 2.4.1
    linux kernel 3.13.0-24- generic
    intel core 17-2600kcpu at 3.4 ghzx4
    memory 16gig

  38. @ 47

    to update kde it’s very simple:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  39. It will be a VERY good thing if keyboard layout applet can let me assign a key combination to cycle through layouts. Now I’m forced to dig into xkb config/resource files to have Super+Space combination working…

  40. Minor issue but it bothers. For not entirely known reasons (at first, I thought it was after opening theming menu) Cinnamon on the system monitor starts using progressively more CPU % for simple tasks as draging windows, and used RAM starts growing. It seems there’s no other way to Stop & Restart Cinnamon to avoid the problem. Since the process that holds up to 50% of both processors in “cinnamon”. Usual workload for that in 2.2 is no more than 5%

    I’m using Core Duo 2.8 with 2Gb RAM.

  41. Halp, I lost muh headphones!1

    Love the new Cinnamon tweaks. Nice little touches everywhere and a little snappier overall is my subjective impression. Look good. I have a monitor with HDMI sound. Normally I use my headphones out the front port, but when it’s convenient I sometimes use the built-in speakers from the monitor via the HDMI. Works great, but once I updated to 2.4, I lost both the headphones out the front and the speakers out the back in the Sound preferences. Now all that’s left is the HDMI (the monitor) which means I effectively can’t listen to audio now (only occasionally can I use the monitor speakers conveniently). Halp!

    Probably not related to Cinnamon, but I wanted to ask if Rebecca will have the patch to fix the Intuos 5 touch bug with the Graphics Tablet preferences. I mentioned this issue to you back when Qiana was released, and you said you’d look into getting one of the devs a tablet back then. I hope it will be ready soon so I can fully abandon the other OSs I have to run to use my tablet switch over to Linux Mint instead.

    Thanks for all the great work on Mint, you and all the team Clem.

  42. After using it for a few days, It’s fantastic! I love the background shuffling and the way it works. I have a whole folder of images the exact resolution of my 3 monitor setup, and they are on shuffle now, and it looks and works fantastic! Any word on making the nemo background match the terminal backgrounds? http://imgur.com/MG9lav2

  43. @53. derpyloves
    UPDATE: Welp, I haven’t changed anything other than bouncing my machine a couple of additional times (beyond what I tried initially) and waiting for a few hours, but the problem seems to have magically gone away.

    I now have all three options (HDMI, Headphones, Analog Output) back again in Sound preferences.

    Looking forward to meeting Rebecca, heh.

  44. @ #33 TechDud:
    I am currently downloading the new 17.1-RC images and try them over the weekend, when I am back at home. Hopefully there will be some major improvement in respect to those weird GUI freezes.

    Do you have the same or similar model ATI graphics cards as well or only the nForce2 Ultra-400 based motherboard?

    I think it would be beneficial, if you could test on your H/W too, to verify my issues and report the exact GPU you are using.

    Based on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver from 2014-07-04, there shouldn’t be any problem for my graphics cards at all.

  45. Decided to bit the bullet since I had the whole weekend to fix my machine if something went awry. No issues whatsoever for now (Cinnamon).Thanks!

  46. Good afternoon.
    I upgraded to Cinnamon 2.4.
    Privacy feature does not work properly.
    When I turn off the “Remember the last documents” button it warns me about a failed plugin.
    It is not a big problem.
    Only warns at every startup.
    Bye..

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