To manually install new themes for cinnamon from the page provided by Cinnamon Settings, first backup the data of the original theme by opening a terminal and entering
sudo cp -R /usr/share/cinnamon/theme /usr/share/cinnamon/theme_backup
Then download and unpack another theme from http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/themes, save the files to some location - I will save them on my desktop.
Then you have to copy the data from the unpacked folder to the theme folder of cinnamon:
sudo cp -f /home/howtoforge/Desktop/unpackedfolder/cinnamon/* /usr/share/cinnamon/theme
The new data has then replaced the old. To restore the default theme, copy back the backed up data.
How to Manually Install New Cinnamon Themes (Linux Mint/Ubuntu)
Easier method: just put your new theme in /usr/share/themes and then select the newly added theme in cinnamon’s settings.
Example:
cp -R my_theme /usr/share/themes
@CSch: you don’t know how Cinnamon works. The correct solution is to put a new theme to /usr/share/themes.
I dnt know about any command i just downloaded the theme from the cinnamon website and created a folder .themes in my home n extracted the compressed theme in that folder and the new theme showed in the cinnamon theme setting.
I’m just reading about this now and glad ~/.themes is an option like it was with gnome2 because you really shouldn’t be required to put your themes in a global location to have access to them. Aside from not all users have root access to their machine (Work computer or any other situation where someone else is the admin) there is also the fact that you would be creating a junk drawer of themes in the system central location instead of installing them to the users directory. The only time they should be put in a global location like /usr/share/themes is when an admin is installing new themes he wants available to all users. Even as root on my systems I’m glad I don’t have to use that method for installing themes.
You are saying /usr/share/themes is the directory but in my Linux Mint Cinnamon 1.4 all I have is /usr/share/theme without the S. Is this the same or am I using the wrong directory?