Mint 14 Nadia with Gala and Slingshot, and without Cinnamon

[Chdslv]

Yesterday, I wrote about Mint 14 becoming, Mint Elementary, but the thread had been moved to "December screenshots."
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...2#post12386212

I thought the photos would say more than words, so the screenshots.

I had made SolusOS 2 Alpha, a Debian distro to take in Ubuntu ppas and work with Gala and old Slingshot. I like SolusOSvery much, and that's why I did that.

This time, I took Mint 14 and made it work with Gala and new Slingshot of eOS and while still working in "Cinnamon session" work without Cinnamon. I am not very keen on Mint. Now, it is nothing, but Cinnamon and Mate. The engine is Ubuntu Quantal. It is a simple Ubuntu based distro.

So, this Mint 14 is not Cinnamon, not Mate, but Elementarished Mint.
And, if I drop all the Mint applications, it becomes another Ubuntu-Elementary distribution.
If I install all the new applications of eOS, it becomes Elementary Luna, even with the shiny greeter of eOS Luna.

Elementary Luna has a lot of potential, at least their applications, base and especially the window manager - Gala!

Note the memory usage, without Cinnamon!

Of course, I didn't want to go through the hassle, as I wouldn't use Linux Mint for daily work.

Good day!

[zeusalmighty]

Could you go about explaining how you did something like that?

As far as I've tried, using the elementary OS daily ppa and installing pantheon-desktop results in really nasty effects(switchboard plugs don't show up, crashes, theme is all weird).

Is there any way to get a Gala WM with the latest slingshot/plank/switchboard in Lunix Mint 14/Ubuntu 12.10?

[Chdslv]

Could you go about explaining how you did something like that?

As far as I've tried, using the elementary OS daily ppa and installing pantheon-desktop results in really nasty effects(switchboard plugs don't show up, crashes, theme is all weird).

Is there any way to get a Gala WM with the latest slingshot/plank/switchboard in Lunix Mint 14/Ubuntu 12.10?

True enough, it gives nasty effects, if you install the whole thing.

If you are interested having only the "Elementary experience", then you need only Gala. You don't need to install the Pantheon desktop.

1) Add the Elementary daily ppa to your sources.list and update.
2) Install Gala; sudo apt-get install gala
3) Download the Slingshot launcher and Plank as deb packages and
dpkg -i "the deb package" or,
sudo apt-get install slingshot-launcher plank

Then, install Gnome-panel, if you want the right clicking, to use it as the panel.

Then, change the cinnamon to gala in the cinnamon.session, and/or gnome-wm to gala in gnome-classic.session. Add gala, panel to required components.
Changing Cinnamon to Gala is little tricky but can be done.

In Mint, in the xsessions, in the cinnamon.desktop, Cinnamon is directed to /usr/bin/cinnamon, and that could be changed to /usr/bin/gala

Check these places; /usr/share/xsessions and /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions and you'd see what to do.

For example;
[GNOME Session]
Name=Display Manager
RequiredComponents=gnome-panel;gala;gnome-settings-daemon;
RequiredProviders=windowmanager;
DefaultProvider-windowmanager=gala

Both Cinnamon and Pantheon are memory hogs, but in this case, Mint with Gala brought down the memory usage. Mint Cinnamon is 3 times more.

I did this for fun. I am not using Mint at all.

You can achieve this Gala experience much better in Ubuntu Precise or Quantal, and even in Raring

[Chdslv]

I'm bit tired today. I'd give you a step by step instructions to build your Gala experience for Quantal tomorrow, oaky?

[zeusalmighty]

Hmm, no time for me to test it now but I'll get to it tomorrow.

A couple of questions:

- Why would ubuntu Quantal give better results instead of Mint?
- Why not install Wingpanel while you're at it?
- Does Switchboard work?
- Does the GTK theme work correctly? As far as I know there are some incompatibilities with Gnome 3.6 (so I was told).


I'll also try to find a way to create a custom new session rather than mess up the one I'm currectly running.


PS. I see how you got about to get that working. What I'm trying to see is if there's a way to use the nice and fast pantheon suite (switchboard/plank/slingshot/wingpanel/gala) on a distro that is kept updated all the time (such as Ubuntu). I'm just not that happy with how eOS is kept an ubuntu version back for providing what appears to be *just* a DE.

[Chdslv]

Hmm, no time for me to test it now but I'll get to it tomorrow.

A couple of questions:

- Why would ubuntu Quantal give better results instead of Mint?
- Why not install Wingpanel while you're at it?
- Does Switchboard work?
- Does the GTK theme work correctly? As far as I know there are some incompatibilities with Gnome 3.6 (so I was told)

PS. I'm just not that happy with how eOS is kept an ubuntu version back for providing what appears to be *just* a DE.

1) Ubuntu Quantal is faster than Mint. Cinnamon in Mint is just adding bloat to it. Download Quantal mini.iso and install xinit and add Mint nadia repos, update and upgrade, and you are in "Mint 14 Cinnamon." You can then add any app you like. Anyway, Cinnamon is a memory hog.

2) Wingpanel is unconfigurable. It is a copy of Gnome-shell panel, whether it was written in Vala or not. The Slinghsot luancher points upwards and to the left top corner, whatever dock/panel you use. You can link the /usr/bin/slingshot-launcher to any place and click from there and it comes up in the same place.

3) I didn't try Switchboard. I had no need to, as I wanted only to get the Slingshot launcher working. The rest, even Gala WM is of no use to me. I don't want the "new" Slingshot, if it won't have transparency.

4) GTK themes work superbly.

Both Cinnamon and Pantheon are DEs. You can install them or parts of them in any distro. All these developers do is to "glue" the other applications to these DEs, which some of us don't want. I dissect them to get what I want. I don't want neither Plank or Wingpanel as they are unconfigurable. docky is more responsive than Plank. The Wingpanel is just a waste of the screen area--has no value other than the "applications" button. I have placed the old and the new Slingshot in many distros, even in a Debian one. I like the old Slingshot.

If I am to choose between Cinnamon and Gala, I'd choose Gala. You saw the memory usage.
I'd always choose Ubuntu Precise, Quantal or Raring, and never use Mint as a base. What for? Ubuntu is the base and Cinnamon is the DE out of lot out there.

Good day!

Ch

[Chdslv]

By the way, if you need only the Slingshot, there is no need to install Gala, but if you install Gala, you'd get transparency, that is for the old Slingshot.
Otherwise, just add;

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/elementary-os/daily/ubuntu quantal main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/elementary-os/daily/ubuntu quantal main

and,

sudo apt-get update

and,

sudo apt-get download slingshot-launcher

then,

sudo apt-get install libunique-1.0-0

then,

dpkg -i slingshot-launcher_0.7+r303-0+pkg15~precise1_amd64.deb

then navigate to /usr/bin and copy the "slingshot" to you desktop, or use "Add to panel" of your panel, if it is the Gnome-classic-panel and click on that, and you'd have the "new" Slingshot launcher appearing at the top left corner pointing upwards.

If you want the "old" one, you'd have to search the Launchpad for that. I forgot where it was. I have downloaded both the 32 bit and 64 bit deb packages.

When you download the Slingshot-launcher or any other deb package, your present installation would choose the 32 bit or 64 bit by itself.

If you want Gala WM, you might find some difficulty in installing dependencies, but you keep on trying to install one dependency at a time in the Terminal. And, at one point, you'd be instructed by Apt to use

apt-get -f install

do that, and all those dependencies would get installed along with Gala.

Then, do the changes as given in an earlier post above in /usr/share/xsessions and/or in /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions in the appropriate ---.desktop and ---.session

Good day!
Good luck!

Ch

[Chdslv]

I have found away to make the Slingshot launcher work without Gala, Pantheon and even libmutter, so you can just throw away Mutter, libmutter and Cinnamon and get your Compiz to work too.

Have look here, if you are interested;

http://main.solusos.com/showthread.p...1947#post21947

Good day!

Ch

[zeusalmighty]

Well, I've tried creating the session but nothing works. The gala session fails. Anyways, I'd love to see a tutorial at some point but for now I'm calling it quits. Yes, Cinnamon is a bit heavier but I think it's a good blend between resources requirements and features.

I'll just till this whole DE war thing is over. Hopefully we'll be left with better and faster DEs in the end.

[screaminj3sus]

gala is a very nice window manager. Nice effects, lightweight, and stable. I recently started using it with xfce myself, works much better than compiz. I'm also using plank, isntalled them both from the elementary daily ppa on xubuntu 12.10, working very well.

here's my current desktop: