In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration Cinnamon on Ubuntu 16.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Cinnamon is an open-source project that provides users with a full-featured desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems. It is a fork of the GNOME Shell user interface distributed with the GNOME project. It has been designed from the ground up to provide users with a traditional, yet advanced and modern graphical session for their Linux-based operating systems. It’s usually deployed on the Linux Mint distribution.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Cinnamon on a Ubuntu 16.04 server.
Install Cinnamon on Ubuntu 16.04
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing Cinnamon.
First, add the community PPA and this PPA can be used only by Xenial users. And please make sure that idr00t doesn’t provide any guarantee and you understand that you install at your own risk. But the following community PPA has been un-officially given the go-ahead by Moorkai, one of the developers behind the popular Cinnamon PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
Now, type the following command to finally install Cinnamon:
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
To check the installed version of Cinnamon, please issue the below command on your terminal to check whether Cinnamon is installed or not:
cinnamon --version
Step 3. Accessing Cinnamon.
If everything goes OK, log out and select log in with Cinnamon session or Cinnamon (Software Rendering) session if you want it to use software rendering to do more of the graphical work):
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Cinnamon. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Cinnamon on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Cinnamon website.
