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I wrote a few months ago about diving into the Linux Mint Cinnamon theme files to change the default icon size in the Cinnamon menu. Having recently decided to do a “fresh” install (/home partition intact) of Mint 20 beta, which at time of writing is coming out of beta soon). One of the first things I did was dive back into the theme file to change the menu icons to my preferred size, but the file looked completely unfamiliar.

After a few minutes of searching I gave up and started poking around. I was extremely happy to find the controls have now been moved into the GUI. Just right click the Cinnamon menu, configure and click the menu tab.

This may seem like a small thing, but for me this is huge. I spent years using gnome, and each update usually took away various settings (screensaver settings, I’m looking at you) in the name of making things “easier”.

This change of pace in Cinnamon is a breath of fresh air, and one less thing I need to refer to notes in order to change to my liking. Good work, Mint Team.

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If you’re going to add data disks to a linux install, use the UUID rather than the device name (/dev/sda1 etc).

I was adding a volume to my azure VM to use as backup for my local stuff. I added it with the system running and saw it as /dev/sdd. I partitioned it, formatted it etc and saw a nice big 4TB /dev/sdd1. I then added this to my fstab and restarted…

After restarting I took ownership of my /backups mount point without first checking the contents, as it was blank. It turned out that after restarting the device names had jumped around and now sdd1 was my system partition and I had just fsck’ed over my permissions.

I checked into it, and while you *can* try and fix it, there are always going to be some things wrong.
Had to make a new machine, reinstall nextcloud (using nginx this time) and fsck around with moving data from the old data volume to the new one. On the upside, nginx is faster and I now have 4TB for nextcloud.

tl;dr; Always use UUIDs.

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I seem to spend far too much time on changing menu colours, but I take issue with having white menus on white background. Cut to the chase, I did a little light digging into my preferred Cinnamon theme: Mint-Y-Darker-Blue and located the correct (I think) settings.

First off, you’re going to want to copy the theme:
sudo cp -r /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Darker-Blue My-Darker-Blue

Next, edit the context menu for GTK2 apps:
sudo xed /usr/share/themes/My-Darker-Blue/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

Scroll to the end of the top line and edit menu_bg:#FFFFFF to menu_bg:#DBDBDB. Make sure you leave the closing ” in place, also the preceding \n

Next up, we’re looking for the GTK3 setting:
sudo xed /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Darker-Blue/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

Scroll down to line 1439 and change the colour value to eg. #DBDBDB

That’s about it. Just open up Preferences>Themes and select your new controls theme.