How to install Cinnamon on Debian 8.x Jessie

Debian is a GNU / Linux distro recognized by a large majority as one of the most attached to the spirit of free software, at the beginning of Richard Stallman and those who saw in this operating system the great opportunity to offer an open and universal platform. We have part of that slogan demonstrated in the fact that we can choose almost any desktop when installing this distribution from scratch.

Now, in this and in any other distro things change if what we want is to add a desktop to those already available, and that is why we are going to show how to install Cinnamon on Debian 8.x Jessie. And is that the default desktop of Linux Mint has managed to win over crowds of fans who see its flexibility and agility, while respecting a classic desktop format, at its strongest and most recognized point.

Cinnamon It is not included by default in the official Debian repositories, although it is in the Linux Mint repositories. Which in turn has in LMDE a variant based precisely on Debian, so we can use their repositories to take advantage of this desktop environment and its many interesting features.

We modify the repositories file:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

#repositorio de Linux Mint
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com /debian main upstream import

We save and update:

sudo apt-get update

After this we will be alerted to the fact that the repository is not verified, so we install the Linux Mint keyring and we update again.

sudo apt-get install linuxmint-keyring
sudo apt-get update

Now if we install Cinnamon:

sudo apt-get install cinnamon

If we wish, we can install the Linux Mint login manager (if it asks us to reconfigure, we execute "dpkg-reconfigure-mdm" (without the quotes):

sudo apt-get install mdm mint-mdm-themes

We reboot the system, and when the graphical interface appears, we can select this desktop, which will appear next to the one we had by default at the time of installation. And so, we can finally enjoy Cinnamon on Debian.