I really love using Crouton on my Chromebook Pixel LS 2015. I was sad to see that there is no cinnamon desktop environment target with the latest versions of crouton. Below is what I did to get Cinnamon on my chromebook. Much of what I did was taken fromhttps://gist.github.com/sohjsolwin/5939948

1. Create a base chroot
2. Enter your chroot

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsvetko.tsvetkov/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

Once Cinnamon was installed I needed to know how to start it manually. Thanks to the Arch Linux forums for explaining it. You have to create a .xinitrc file in your home directory within your chroot.

echo "exec cinnamon-session" > ~/.xinitrc

Trying to manually start cinnamon by typing startx didn’t work – I got a blank screen and had to hard reset to get anything to come back. Thanks to github I learned you need to use xinit instead of startx.

Lastly, we need to create a suitable startcinnamon script.

wget https://gist.github.com/sohjsolwin/5934362/raw/f68fc0942798902a0bd48f40c17dc0cd5cf585ea/startcinnamon

Modify the file to remove the startx command with xinit. Also remove everything after xinit. My file is as follows:

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a Mint session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "$0"`/enter-chroot" "$@" xinit

Make this file executable (chmod +x startcinnamon) and move it to the /usr/local/bin directory of your chromebook (not your chroot.) Now all you need to do is enter

sudo startcinnamon

and your cinnamon desktop should come up!

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Update 2016-01-04

These two scripts seem to work a little bit better. Place this one within your chroot under /usr/local/bin/startcinnamon:

#!/bin/sh -e
# Copyright (c) 2015 The crouton Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

# Launches GNOME; automatically falls back to gnome-panel

exec crouton-noroot gnome-session-wrapper cinnamon

Place this one in /usr/local/bin outside your chroot (on your chromebook itself.)

#!/bin/sh -e
# Copyright (c) 2015 The crouton Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

set -e

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a GNOME session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "\`readlink -f "$0"\`"`/enter-chroot" -t cinnamon "$@" "" \
    exec startcinnamon