Save Lono

The default UI on Gnome 3 is Bad.  Everyone knows it.  I’ve been running Fedora 14 for what seems like years, hoping that one day the Gnome development team pulls their heads out of their collective asses and restores a simple, low impact interface.  Instead, as of Fedora 16,  I still see these gigantic window title bars, huge ugly icons, lack of minimize and maximize buttons.  What’s next?  Tiles?  Honestly it looks like Gnome 3 was designed for a cell phone.  Or maybe on a cell phone.

Luckily the folks at Mint Linux have been working on a Gnome 3 variant with a sane UI.  One that look like a traditional, but stylish desktop.  I installed Fedora 16 and tried Cinnamon.  While Gnome 2 on Fedora 14 is still more refined, I really like the direction this project is headed.  One problem that vexed me is how to start Cinnamon from run level 3(terminal).

Purpose of this post:

1. Install cinnamon
2. create .xinitrc for startx to work

Step 1

As root,

Now in your home directory create a folder called “.themes”.  This folder will contain any Cinnamon themes you might want.

Step 2
To succussfully ‘startx’ from a terminal create a ‘.xinitrc’ in your home directory file like this,

That’s all there is to it!  I Googled and fretted over this for hours.  Repeat the procedure for any user wishing to use Cinnamon by default.  Hopefully I can save some Fedora users some time!  Thanks to the Mint Linux folks!