Mint's Cinnamon desktop integrated into Fedora 17 (it will be likely part of F18)

[deanej]

Originally Posted by dcharlespyle

I spent a couple days experimenting with the newer versions of the packages. I removed the proprietary drivers but still got the same behavior. So, I reinstalled mesa drivers. Still no joy. So, I reinstalled the i686 packages and there was improvement. There was less flashing. There was more stability.

I then tweaked video card settings in an xorg.conf and got really good results. I still wanted more, however, and tried a tip I saw over at the Linux Mint site, which was to run cinnamon --replace. I did it and got near perfection. So, I decided that I wanted to keep those really good settings but GDM just kept taking over on reboot. I made a startup option that would run that command on startup. I got flawless video from the window manager. Then, I tried to login to Gnome and got less than desirable results. So, I unchecked the startup option I had created in Cinnamon and was able to login.

When I tried to log back into Cinnamon, however, I was greeted with the following error:

No system tray detected on this system.
Unable to start. Exiting.

I was able to logon to Cinnamon 2D but not Cinnamon, unless I turned back on my startup option to automatically run the command mentioned above, from within Cinnamon 2D. I can then log back onto Cinnamon with flawless video.

Looks like Cinnamon isn't any longer going to play nice with Gnome. If I can't fix this somehow, I think I will be reporting this as a bug. Any suggestions for things to try? I have already reinstalled both muffin and cinnamon but nothing has changed after several hours of missing with things.

Here is where I am at:

$ rpm -qa cinnamon muffin\*
muffin-debuginfo-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64
muffin-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64
cinnamon-1.5.1-1.fc17.x86_64
muffin-devel-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64

I think this might be a 64-bit issue combined with with a video card that's incomparable with Gnome 3.

Originally Posted by deanej

I think this might be a 64-bit issue combined with with a video card that's incomparable with Gnome 3.

I don't use 32 bit rubbish

[dcharlespyle]

A blacklist? That would be really, really odd, considering that I was able to logon just fine to a "gnome-session --session=cinnamon" before I ran "cinnamon --replace" as a startup option. I know that there is a blacklist that was patched in but I do not recall seeing my card as one of those in that list. I'll have to go take a look. But, why would it work fine before running that command if it were on the blacklist? One would think that the blacklist patch would have prevented that in the first place.

Something else of interest is that the command "cinnamon --replace" is still showing up in the processes tab of gnome-system-monitor. I would have expected that command to run and then close, rather than stay open. Of course, if I run it in a terminal window I also notice that it stays there running until the process is killed or otherwise terminated, which, of course, brings down cinnamon as well.

So, it doesn't really seem to be a process that switches out the default window manager but one that "seizes control" from Gnome's gdm and "holds onto it for dear life." That is some really odd behavior, in my opinion, and one that does not play nice with other window managers on a system when you should just be able to switch between them as I sometimes do, and have done without problem in the past.

In that case, I am guessing I need to find the file where cinnamon stores the information that tells it that gdm has been replaced and that it is dependent on gdm being replaced from that time forward in order to load the system tray. If you know where that is it would be easier if you told me where to look rather than go blindly look for it and "reinvent the wheel." I could then at least create a workaround for my situation in a script to set things right on logoff, and use that as the startup option rather than the errant command itself

(Added: I just realized that the reason that cinnamon --replace still is running is because it is a program option rather than a command that runs before cinnamon loads. It's what I get for posting when tired). :-).


---------- Post added at 08:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:14 PM ----------

Originally Posted by deanej

I think this might be a 64-bit issue combined with with a video card that's incomparable with Gnome 3.

Gnome 3 worked fine and beautifully with the card I have (Asustek EAH5750 Formula (ATi Radeon HD5750-based) with 1 Gbyte of GDDR5 vram) and always has. I am not sure that is the problem.

I am not sure about the 32-bit issue, either. I have programs that throw all sorts of errors without some of those 32-bit libraries installed. Wine is dependent on them as well when running some programs to make them run correctly.

Yellowdog,

Even a straight 64-bit installation leaves me with a /usr/lib directory, meaning that there are 32-bit programs installed as part of a straight x86_64 installation. If there were no 32-bit programs there would be no need for separate /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 directories, meaning that you may well be running 32-bit programs and may or may not not be aware of it. :-)

[deanej]

Originally Posted by dcharlespyle

Gnome 3 worked fine and beautifully with the card I have (Asustek EAH5750 Formula (ATi Radeon HD5750-based) with 1 Gbyte of GDDR5 vram) and always has. I am not sure that is the problem.

Are you SURE that it's running fine and beautifully? While Gnome 3.0 and 3.2 would go into fallback mode with a card that's incompatible, one of the new features of 3.4 is a new mode for these cards that emulates the full shell perfectly. To the best of my knowledge, cinnamon has no such feature.

[dd_wizard]

Originally Posted by deanej

Are you SURE that it's running fine and beautifully? While Gnome 3.0 and 3.2 would go into fallback mode with a card that's incompatible, one of the new features of 3.4 is a new mode for these cards that emulates the full shell perfectly. To the best of my knowledge, cinnamon has no such feature.

Cinnamon has a 2D mode for older cards. I've tried it, and it seems to work fine. BTW:

Installed Packages
cinnamon.x86_64                   1.5.2-2.fc17                    @/cinnamon-1.5.2-2.fc17.x86_64
muffin.x86_64                     1.0.5-1.fc17                    @/muffin-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64

They're available in koji.

dd_wizard

[deanej]

What's koji?

Based on dcharlespyle's comments, I don't think it's as seamless as the gnome one is rumored to be. Looks like it's only available in Fedora 17 as well; Fedora 16 is still stuck with cinnamon 1.40 rather than 1.52.

[dd_wizard]

Koji is the Fedora build system. Just enter the package you're interested in into the Search box and look for the newest version. Be warned though, these packages may or may not have been tested yet.

dd_wizard

Originally Posted by deanej

What's koji?

Based on dcharlespyle's comments, I don't think it's as seamless as the gnome one is rumored to be. Looks like it's only available in Fedora 17 as well; Fedora 16 is still stuck with cinnamon 1.40 rather than 1.52.

F16 will remain at 1.4.x as it hasn't got the required gtk3 version to build 1.5.x

---------- Post added at 10:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:57 PM ----------

Originally Posted by dd_wizard

Cinnamon has a 2D mode for older cards. I've tried it, and it seems to work fine. BTW:

Installed Packages
cinnamon.x86_64                   1.5.2-2.fc17                    @/cinnamon-1.5.2-2.fc17.x86_64
muffin.x86_64                     1.0.5-1.fc17                    @/muffin-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64

They're available in koji.

dd_wizard

They are awaiting push to stable.

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...n-1.5.2-2.fc17

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...n-1.5.1-1.fc17

[epperson]

Originally Posted by bigflopper2

yeah, funning thing is gnome3 is not rly listening to user complaints, they're just going the "tablet-way" and beside that they don't want to look at any other DEs.

Surely it should have come to their ears by now that DEs like Cinnamon and Mate only exist because of their ***.

Oh, I think they're listening. Like the Stasi used to listen. Why do you suppose the gmenu plugin disappeared from cairo-dock? Why do you reckon there's no gno-menu for Fedora, nullifying the presence of cairo's gno-menu plugin? They don't want US to look at add-ons to mitigate the functionality that keeps falling off the Gnome truck, much less other DEs.

That may be over the "political" line. Spank me.

[dcharlespyle]

Originally Posted by deanej

Are you SURE that it's running fine and beautifully? While Gnome 3.0 and 3.2 would go into fallback mode with a card that's incompatible, one of the new features of 3.4 is a new mode for these cards that emulates the full shell perfectly. To the best of my knowledge, cinnamon has no such feature.

I am 100% certain. I have been using gnome since the days of Caldera OpenLinux and
Red Hat 5. I used gnome with Scientific Linux to 6.1, and I have used gnome-shell since its version 3.0 and never once have I had gnome go into fallback mode.

I also checked the blacklist and my card isn't in there. The only problem I ever experienced when using the open source drivers was a small bit of video corruption as plymouth handed control over to gdm. Since kernel 3.5.0-2 that has considerably lessened to the point of not seeing it for many of my reboots over the last few days of experimenting with rawhide and even after reinstalling Fedora 17.

Since the latest updates from koji I have not yet seen any of the problems I experienced prior with muffin or cinnamon. It only got even better with kernel 3.5.0-2.

[deanej]

Well, the gnome team is infamous for breaking things, after all.

[dcharlespyle]

Originally Posted by deanej

Well, the gnome team is infamous for breaking things, after all.

That is true. I have seen it fairly often over the years. :-)