Fedora Repo

Posted on by Steve Zesch
4

UPDATE 11/11/2012:
I’ve been told that the repo is back up. I’ve also been made aware that the Dropbox repo and the repo included in Fedora conflict and can make the desktop unusable. Please consult #fedora-mate for help if you plan on moving from one repo to the other.

Original Post:
It’s been brought to our attention that the Fedora repo that is hosted on Dropbox no longer works due to an excessive amount of bandwidth being used. We are now directing users to use the official Fedora repo now. For instructions on using this repo, please consult our wiki page located here.

For more information about MATE’s official inclusion in Fedora, see this page.

If you have any questions regarding moving from one repo to the other, please ask for help in #fedora-mate on irc.freenode.net. As always, general MATE questions can be asked in #mate.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Replies

Pluma vs Geany Lite

Posted on by Steve Zesch
34

Recently, Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint has had discussions with the developers of Geany about possibly creating a lightweight version of Geany (we’ll call it Geany Lite in this post). At this point, Geany Lite is nothing more than an idea and it’s unknown whether or not this idea will come to fruition, so please keep that in mind while reading this post. So far, the only differences between Geany and Geany Lite that have been discussed are the default hiding of UI features that are more suited for developers than users seeking a lightweight text editor. You can follow the discussion on the Geany mailing list here (October) and here (November).

The point of this post is to provide a brief overview of why we thinking dropping Pluma in favor of Geany Lite would be a good change and to determine how our users feel about this. If you feel strongly about whether or not we should make this change, now is your chance to let your opinion be known. If we receive a strong negative reaction, we will not go through with it.

The main reason we are interested in using Geany Lite as the default text editor for MATE is that it will receive significantly more attention from developers than Pluma will. The MATE team is very small and maintains a very large number of packages, so we can’t guarantee that Pluma will receive the attention it deserves every release cycle. Since Geany has its own dev team that is independent of MATE, our users would be getting a text editor that is consistently being improved and bug fixes would be released in a more timely fashion. We believe that adopting Geany Lite in place of Pluma would provide our users with the best possible experience going forward.

Please respond to this post with your feelings (positive or negative) regarding this potential change. Again, Geany Lite is just an idea and it’s possible that it never comes into existence. In order to make it easier for use to sort through user feedback, we will not be approving comments that are unrelated to this topic.

Feel free to stop by #mate on irc.freenode.net to discuss the idea further.

Posted in Uncategorized | 34 Replies

MATE Quantal Repo Available

Posted on by Steve Zesch
12

An Ubuntu 12.10 repo is now available for our 1.4 release. As usual, follow these instructions to install.

If you’re upgrading from an older release, please make sure that you remove the old repos and add the new repos. Otherwise, you will encounter problems.

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Replies

MATE 1.4 released

Posted on by Steve Zesch
99

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE 1.4.

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Changes in 1.4:

  • Numerous bug fixes
  • mate-keyring and libmatekeyring backends updated and now integrate properly
  • caja-dropbox package now available
  • New themes added to mate-notification-daemon
  • Removed indicator-applet-session
  • File sharing now available via bluetooth
  • Added option to use fast alt-tabbing when compositing is enabled in marco
  • mate-icon-theme-faenza now available
  • mate-character-map now available
  • mate-screensaver now supports GDM user switching
  • Removed nyancat from the mate-desktop about dialog
  • Forked libwnck (now libmatewnck)
  • Caja improvements:
    • Restored toggle button for text based location bar
    • Bookmarks can now be opened in the places side pane via the enter and space keys
    • Added a button to get the difference between files in the file conflict dialog

Important:
We are experiencing difficult with packages.mate-desktop.org. During the update process, if you encounter connection problems, please use repo.mate-desktop.org instead of packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/. Also, please note that it is repo.mate-desktop.org and NOT repo.mate-desktop.org/repo/. If you are a Linux Mint user and make this change, remember to change /etc/apt/preferences as well.

Posted in Uncategorized | 99 Replies

Repo Issues

Posted on by Steve Zesch
8

There have been issues connecting to our repo at packages.mate-desktop.org. We are aware of these issues and hopefully they will be resolved shortly. A new release announcement will follow shortly thereafter.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Replies

MATE 1.2 released

Posted on by stefano-k
158

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE 1.2. This release is a huge step forward since the 1.0 and 1.1 development releases. MATE is more stable than ever and it includes support for many more applications, applets and backends.

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Here are the main changes and improvements in this release:

  • Numerous bug fixes
  • All conflicts with GNOME were fixed
  • All configuration files were moved to ~/.config/mate
  • An undo/redo feature was added in Caja
  • Libmate’s mate-open command is now faster to open applications.
  • Mate settings daemon now supports the PulseAudio and GStreamer backends
  • New applications: mozo (alacarte fork), python-caja, caja-gksu, caja-image-converter
  • Artwork:
    • Mate themes were renamed to avoid conflicts with GNOME
    • A new MATE wallpaper was added
    • MATE now features its own icon
Posted in News, Releases | 158 Replies

Reporting Bugs

Posted on by Steve Zesch
33

We are currently in the process of switching to handling all our issues on the mate-desktop github page instead of Perberos’ page. The reason is simple: when Perberos is away none of the other developers can close tickets. This creates a bit of a mess.

Now, when you go to report a bug you must chose the correct github repo to issue the bug in. It’s pretty simple. If there’s a bug with mate-panel, then submit the issue on the mate-panel issue tracker.

Once we close these last few open bugs (yes it says 22, but we can’t close many that have been solved) we’ll no longer be monitoring Perberos’ issue tracker, so we ask that you refrain from opening new bugs there.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Posted in Uncategorized | 33 Replies

New wiki and other info

Posted on by Steve Zesch
6

We’ve recently switched from our old github based wiki to our new wiki at wiki.mate-desktop.org. Please reference this wiki from here on out. Naturally, anyone is welcome to contribute.

For those of you who aren’t already aware, you can report issues on github here. At the moment, this is all we have in terms of bug reporting, but we do have a bugtracker in the works. We’ll announce it here when it’s ready.

We also have future plans for a Mate forum, but that is at a very early stage.

For those of you using Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint, you can access the 1.1.x development branch of our packages using the tridex repo. Check out this wiki page on downloading for more info. Linux Mint also has our 1.0.x release packages in their repo. If anyone is still using my (Amanas) ppa, it is no longer supported. The rest of our 1.1.x releases will be hosted on the tridex repos. Future releases (eg. 1.2.0) will be hosted here.

We are proud to announce that packing for openSUSE has begun. Once we have more information we will add it to our wiki and make an announcement.

Lastly, we have had several individuals join our irc channel and ask about Gentoo ebuilds for Mate. With that being said, we are looking for people who are willing to set these up.

Happy Holidays from the Mate team.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Replies

Hello world!

Posted on by clem
79

Hello World!

Gnome 2 was the most popular Linux desktop but it’s no longer available… MATE is here to provide that same desktop to you spacer

Perberos initially forked Gnome 2 and called the project MATE. Users and developers were successful at running MATE in Arch Linux and due to popular demand Perberos made it easier for MATE to compile under Debian.

Stefano-k and myself then joined the project and packaged it for Debian and Linux Mint. The MATE desktop was featured in Linux Mint 12 and is now quickly gaining momentum.

Our top priority is to improve MATE and for it to be on par, in terms of features and stability, with Gnome 2.32. We’ll port themes, applets, and applications which were developed for Gnome 2, and help developers port theirs to this new desktop.

Posted in Uncategorized | 79 Replies