Replacing Nautilus with Nemo

As posted previously I've replaced Unity (meh) with Cinnamon on my Ubuntu laptop.

Cinnamon comes with a fork of the Nautilus file manager, called Nemo, which is a slight improvement I find. However, although various posts go through how to install Nemo, I found that it and Nautilus were competing to draw the desktop - such that on every other re-boot I was running one or the other.

So, as well as ensuring that any folder launch commands and file associations use Nemo over Nautilus, I also had to prevent Nautilus from auto-starting:

In Ubuntu the X-Server desktop menu set-up is held at /etc/xdg. Within this, folder autostart determines what starts automatically with the desktop. Remove the nautilus-autostart.desktop file from there (and make sure the Nemo install has added one). This should mean Nemo is preferred everywhere.

More excellent details here.

Cinnamon on Ubuntu

Since switching to Ubuntu 12.04 I've moved to using Cinnamon as my DE. I did give Unity a serious go for a couple of weeks, but after one evening trying to use it to support a software release - switching between 3 browser windows and 2 SSH sessions, it became obvious it wasn't suitable. For many reasons, documented all over the web.

So I installed Cinnamon and despite a few teething problems (I think mainly caused by my nVidia card) it works beautifully. Nice weather, battery, and monitor applets; a simple, clean look, and easily configurable. As nice as Gnome used to be.

One issue I had recently though is that Wine applications place their menu items within the 'Other' area of the Menu (see this post), and when attempting to tidy this up, Cinnamon locked up and refused to restart. Even re-booting didn't solve the problem. I was kind of stuck as I couldn't see where the configuration was, or how it had failed. A remove/purge and re-install didn't fix anything (as configuration is held at user-level this is 'safe' to do. In that, you don't lose any settings/applets).

The solution arrived via this post (searching for the syslog failure message - Cinnamon seemed stuck at launch) - however as I'd never edited my Menu prior to this incident I had no 'backup' of the cinnamon-applications.menu file. However, reading through the first post, above, the installation version seems to be at /etc/xdg/menus/cinnamon-applications.menu so copying that to ~/.config/menus and restarting sorted things out.

Incidentally, following this stack-exchange entry I found that deleting entries from ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs and again in the ~/.config/menus/applications-merged area achieved much the same thing as editing the menu in the DE, with less chance of issues(!)