Cinnamon stable PPA unavailable for Ubuntu 12.04?

[Kalith]

Hello,

Does anyone know what happened to the Cinnamon stable PPA?
Link: https://launchpad.net/~gwendal-lebihan- ... mon-stable

It seems I can still download packages from there, but I cannot access the PPA webpage to browse the list of packages.
I wonder if this repository is going to die, and if I should look for a new one.

Thank you.

[xenopeek]

Nightly is still there: https://launchpad.net/~gwendal-lebihan- ... on-nightly

I have no idea. You can join #linuxmint-dev chatroom and ask glebihan himself there

[glebihan]

The PPA is indeed going to be closed.
Packages are temporarily still available, but it should be completely closed within a few weeks.

[Kalith]

Thank you for your answer. Do you suggest any alternative? Is the nightly PPA stable enough for production stations?
I don't know your reasons, but I have to say that this PPA was great in that it provided the cool features of recent versions of cinnamon & nemo while being quite stable.

[glebihan]

At the moment, I don't know of any other PPA that would provide known stable builds of cinnamon.
As of right now, the nightly PPA is fairly stable as we just released Cinnamon 2.2 and are only fixing bugs and not implementing new features.
However, in the normal state of things, the nightly PPA is highly unstable and certainly not recommended for any production system.

As for the reasons, there are of course several ones, the main one probably being that many people were wrongly seeing that PPA as providing official Ubuntu packages, when it never was official and actually contained Mint builds.
Considering Cinnamon releases are in sync with Mint's (the Cinnamon releases always occur a short while before Mint releases), and that Mint always ships the latest version of Cinnamon, I didn't see much point in continuing to maintain that PPA.

In all honesty, I also hope that someone will finally step up on Ubuntu's side to provide decent Cinnamon packages, thus effectively making the PPA useless.

[Kalith]

I am actually a Mint user. I have Nadia installed on my machine, but cinnamon 2 is not backported there (I guess we only have 1.8.4), so I used that PPA to try the new features without having to reinstall a new distro. Works like a charm so far.
I understand the reasons though. We'll see what comes out of it, thank you for the clarification.

For reference, the French ubuntu help already aknowledge that your PPA is gone, and suggests to move to this one:
https://launchpad.net/~kranich/+archive/cubuntu
The thing is that this PPA only provides packages for 'trusty' and above.

[Trespasser]

glebihan,
This decision to discontinue the stable branch of Cinnamon is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold who still use Precise (like I do and will continue to do so...Trusty is just too buggy for my liking as of now). What are we to do if we wish to do a re-install? The nightly builds don't have any packages for Precise so we can't use it. IMO, the download site should still be available to users until Ubuntu's repos are updated to ALL the stable packages. Ubuntu's repos presently only has cinnamon 1.7.4 (I could not even find nemo). And, besides, 2.0 is so much better than 1.7.4.

This sucks, but thanks for your time.

Later...

Bob

[xenopeek]

This decision to discontinue the stable branch of Cinnamon is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold who still use Precise

Cinnamon 2.0 is available in the backports repository of Maya (one click to enable in Software Sources IIRC). I doubt indeed Cinnamon 2.2 is going to be backported to Maya as Quina is the new LTS.

You state that Trusty is being too buggy for you. Hence I don't understand then why you would want to run Cinnamon 2.2 on the old LTS; do you think that will give you a less buggy experience?

[glebihan]

The thing is that this PPA only provides packages for 'trusty' and above.

Cinnamon 2.2 is only compatible with Trusty and above, as it requires gtk >= 3.10.

[Trespasser]

xenopeek,
Maybe I should explain myself better. I use a Precise 64 bit mini.iso to install my base system. I then run a bash script, which includes a listing for the Cinnamon stable ppa, to install Cinnamon (2.0) packages. I don't use Mint (never have). Thus I don't have access to the backports repository. With reference to Cinnamon 2.2, I'd love to be able to use it in Precise but as glebihan point out it's not possible.

Like I pointed out earlier, I don't use Mint, but I do think Cinnamon is the best thing to happen to Gnome 3 Desktop Environments (DE) since sliced bread. I simply love it. That's why it's so upsetting to me to read that the stable branch is being shutdown.

Keep in mind, glebihan, that Precise still has three more years of life left in it. That's a long time.

Later...

Bob

This decision to discontinue the stable branch of Cinnamon is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold who still use Precise

Cinnamon 2.0 is available in the backports repository of Maya (one click to enable in Software Sources IIRC). I doubt indeed Cinnamon 2.2 is going to be backported to Maya as Quina is the new LTS.

You state that Trusty is being too buggy for you. Hence I don't understand then why you would want to run Cinnamon 2.2 on the old LTS; do you think that will give you a less buggy experience?

[xenopeek]

Packages are here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php? ... a#backport. You can download the 2.0 packages from there, or you can copy the backports repository from Linux Mint /etc/sources.list.d and add that on your Ubuntu install. That should work I think. Of course you can compile it from source also. Perhaps there are other (easier) alternatives that others can suggest.

Moved the topic here as this is not about Linux Mint, but about Ubuntu and Cinnamon.

[glebihan]

Keep in mind, glebihan, that Precise still has three more years of life left in it. That's a long time.

Even if I decided to keep maintaining the PPA, that would change nothing as far as Precise it concerned.
As I mentioned, Cinnamon 2.2 requires gtk >= 3.10 and unless you're going to install gtk3.10 on precise (which would be a really bad idea), you won't get Cinnamon 2.2 on it, even if you decided to compile it on your own.

[killer de bug]

As Xenopeek mentioned it, Cinnamon 2.0 is in the backport, and thus only one edit away. Just add the backport repo in your sources.list file and install Cinnamon.
I don't see the point in complaining because a ppa is going away...

[MadmanRB]

Personally I dont understand why glebihan took away the ppa and is forcing non mint users of ubuntu to use a unstable ppa.
This is ridiculous especially if you want to make a cinnamon spinoff of ubuntu without resorting to mint.
This is lame, I mean whats the deal with keeping a unstable ppa while ditching a stable?
This sucks and I really would like a good reason for this mess.

[killer de bug]

This sucks and I really would like a good reason for this mess.

Because there is no good reasons to keep this ppa...
If you want Cinnamon, take it from Mint repo!

[xenopeek]

Personally I dont understand why glebihan took away the ppa and is forcing non mint users of ubuntu to use a unstable ppa.

You can use Cinnamon stable on Ubuntu if you want. Right now it appears nobody else (including you!) is interested in doing the work to maintain a Cinnamon stable PPA for Ubuntu, but you can compile Cinnamon stable from source on Ubuntu. That's a few more steps, but the option is there.

I can understand the disappointment of the stable PPA going away, but surely the pool of enthusiast users at Ubuntu is large enough that somebody else will step up to do the work to maintain the PPA (why not you?). Linux Mint developers don't maintain Cinnamon packages for the other Linux and BSD distros either; that's done by enthusiast users and developers of those distros--just as it is with any other desktop environments!

Many distros already have Cinnamon in their official repositories, like Fedora and Arch Linux. Ubuntu could follow that lead.

The unstable PPA is for development and testing purposes. It serves a purpose to the Linux Mint developers, the stable PPA doesn't (as stable packages are in the Linux Mint repositories). Again, for other distros enthusiast users and developers are maintaining the packages--just like for all other desktop environments.

[glebihan]

Personally I dont understand why glebihan took away the ppa and is forcing non mint users of ubuntu to use a unstable ppa.
This is ridiculous especially if you want to make a cinnamon spinoff of ubuntu without resorting to mint.
This is lame, I mean whats the deal with keeping a unstable ppa while ditching a stable?
This sucks and I really would like a good reason for this mess.

I'm not forcing anyone to do anything.
I gave some of my time to provide a stable PPA to Ubuntu users for about 2 years, because I felt it was needed to help people discover Cinnamon until Ubuntu packaged it themselves.
We're reaching a point where almost all major distributions have made Cinnamon available to their users easily, and it's now Ubuntu's responsibility to decide whether they want to provide it to their users or not.
If they decide they don't care about Cinnamon, then it's honestly better for Ubuntu users willing to run Cinnamon to start looking for an alternate distribution (let's be clear, I hope it won't come to that and that someone will step up and do the job).

Also, if people are unhappy to see the stable PPA gone, I'm not preventing anyone from building a new one, but I simply don't have the time to handle it myself (taken into consideration the number of users it would actually benefit).

As for the reasons to keep the nightly PPA, they are very simple : that PPA is not (and never was) intended for end users, it targets developers, and aims at making it easier for them to install the latest Cinnamon development environment without having to compile every single package (they're numerous and most developers only work on a few of them).

[oxidator]

Packages are here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php? ... a#backport. You can download the 2.0 packages from there, or you can copy the backports repository from Linux Mint /etc/sources.list.d and add that on your Ubuntu install. That should work I think. Of course you can compile it from source also. Perhaps there are other (easier) alternatives that others can suggest.

Moved the topic here as this is not about Linux Mint, but about Ubuntu and Cinnamon.

It works (as xenopeek suggests)

First add the next two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ maya backport
deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ maya backport

Second, add the GPG key by executing the next two lines on a terminal window:
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-key --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 3EE67F3D0FF405B2
$ gpg --export --armor 3EE67F3D0FF405B2| sudo apt-key add -

Be careful with the hyphen at the end of the second line

Then you can update your packages and install Cinnamon.
So the glebihan repository is no longer necessary, as he said.

Hope this helps.

[xenopeek]

Two new PPAs have popped up for Ubuntu LTS users, see here: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/06/new-cinn ... buntu.html

To be clear DO NOT use these on Linux Mint! On Linux Mint 13 you can enable the backports repository from Software Sources to get a newer version of Cinnamon. You won't be able to use the latest version of Cinnamon on Linux Mint 13 (or Ubuntu 12.04) as it requires newer Gtk libraries than are available on it.