Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

Lilith · 2012-04-27 22:03:38

I love you man. Gnome2 is very wonderful. Thank you for had make fast and stable.

GordonGR · 2012-05-08 17:27:19

Hallo.

I am trying Caja on XFCE and I have a problem: Whenever I start it, with any switch, not only does it start the window I wish, but it also starts 4-5 other windows, all at the home folder. I deleted .mate and .mateconf directories and tried again, but it didn't help. Terminal shows nothing. I had used Nautilus 2 a year back and this didn't happen. Any ideas?

Thanks.

sleepforlife · 2012-05-08 17:29:07

caja --nodesktop

sorry
caja --no-desktop

Last edited by sleepforlife (2012-05-08 17:31:38)

GordonGR · 2012-05-08 17:31:00

Nope.

sleepforlife · 2012-05-08 17:31:51

sorry
caja --no-desktop

GordonGR · 2012-05-08 17:33:19

Yes, that doesn't help. It opens the desired window, it doesn't draw the desktop, but still it starts five more unwanted windows.

GordonGR · 2012-05-08 18:44:26

Also, I tried this but the problem remains. I shut Caja down and restarted it and now it won't open:

nikos@Russell:~$ caja --quit
nikos@Russell:~$ caja --no-desktop
** (caja:15916): WARNING **: Error while sending message: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)

Dbus is running:

nikos@Russell:~$ less /etc/rc.conf | grep dbus
DAEMONS=(hwclock syslog-ng network netfs dbus alsa crond cupsd samba !kdm sensors)
nikos@Russell:~$ ps ax | grep dbus
611 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system
13925 tty2 S 0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session
13926 ? Ss 0:01 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
16089 pts/114 S+ 0:00 grep --color=auto dbus

dotpointer · 2012-05-13 00:16:11

First of all great thanks for Mate.

Until to today I have been staying in Ubuntu 11.04/Gnome2.
Both Unity and Gnome 3 feels like a step back in development in so many ways - missing settings, missing theming options and so on.

Currently I'm trying out Ubuntu 12.04/Mate 1.2 and I've got the most of the GUI as I want it.

Some things I can't figure out though:

- Themes + Compiz does still not work. If I run compiz --replace all window borders are removed.
As I need borders to move windows I cannot start Compiz and therefore I cannot start Cairo dock which needs Compiz.
Compiz is version 0.9.7.8 - should I download and compile from somewhere?

Annoying things I've encountered:
- Needed to add --no-daemon to /etc/xdg.../mate-settings-daemon.desktop otherwise the daemon would not start = theming/icons looked bad.
- Missing settings in System->Settings-menu: sound, power options, remote desktop, bluetooth, some have appeared when I've installed single packages through synaptic package manager.

Last edited by dotpointer (2012-05-13 01:28:30)

cb474 · 2012-05-14 07:45:01

dotpointer wrote:

If I run compiz --replace all window borders are removed.
As I need borders to move windows I cannot start Compiz.

Have you checked to make sure that the Window Decoration plugin is enabled in the CompizConfig Settings Manager? You also need the Move Window and Resize Window plugins enabled for normal window behavior.

I ran into this issue with Mate in LMDE. None of these plugins for basic window functionality were enabled by default.

Last edited by cb474 (2012-05-14 07:45:17)

MisterAnderson · 2012-05-14 10:15:31

I've missed gnome 2 since it got ditched, and now Mate is version 1.2 I'm going to give it a go. The only problem I'm having is that mate-display-manager fails to install properly. I'm getting this:

[greg@tab ~]$ sudo pacman -S mate-display-manager
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...

Targets (1): mate-display-manager-2011.12.16-1

Total Installed Size:   7.29 MiB

Proceed with installation? [Y/n]      
(1/1) checking package integrity                                            [-------------------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                                                 [-------------------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                                           [-------------------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) checking available disk space                                         [-------------------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) installing mate-display-manager                                       [-------------------------------------------] 100%
warning: directory permissions differ on var/log/mdm/
filesystem: 1770  package: 755
groupadd: GID '121' already exists
useradd: group 'mdm' does not exist
passwd: user 'mdm' does not exist
chown: invalid user: ‘mdm:mdm’

Why is it trying to add a group with a certain GID?

EDIT: I checked in /etc/group and the group "lxdm" had the GID of 121, so I uninstalled it, and mdm installed with no issue (I also chmod'd /var/log/mdm to 755) but I don't understand why this was an issue in the first place?

Last edited by MisterAnderson (2012-05-14 10:33:48)

sleepforlife · 2012-05-15 18:52:20

how can i uninstall all mate apps?

dotpointer · 2012-05-15 20:33:24

cb474 wrote:

dotpointer wrote:
If I run compiz --replace all window borders are removed.
As I need borders to move windows I cannot start Compiz.
Have you checked to make sure that the Window Decoration plugin is enabled in the CompizConfig Settings Manager? You also need the Move Window and Resize Window plugins enabled for normal window behavior.
I ran into this issue with Mate in LMDE. None of these plugins for basic window functionality were enabled by default.

This surely has something to do with it...

None of these are activated, but they won't stay activated if I check them in compizconfig and click close. Next time I open up are the settings unchecked again.

Tried changing backend in compizconfig -> settings (on the left below) -> backend from "Flat file configuration backend" to "Gconf configuration backend".

This makes settings stay, but but when I run compiz --replace my theme is replaced by Ubuntu default theme and dock does not get painted at all.
Restarting the dock will paint it but with the black box telling no OpenGL is on.

Gconf should possibly be Mateconf instead...?

Last edited by dotpointer (2012-05-15 20:37:06)

cb474 · 2012-05-16 08:49:16

Hmm. I think it's getting over my head at this point. I'm not actually using Mate in Arch (I just haven't upgraded my Arch system since Gnome 3 came out, which may be a bad idea, but I'm still running Gnome 2).

I've fiddled with Mate in LMDE and regular Linux Mint instead and things worked fine once I enabled the plugins using the CCSM gui (although mate was still a little slow and clunky in some ways, compared to Gnome 2). I didn't want to get into all the configuration issues, by installling Mate in Arch.

All that to say, sorry I can't help you more on how to get Compiz working right. Good luck. I hope others have more suggestions for you.

Last edited by cb474 (2012-05-16 08:51:18)

dotpointer · 2012-05-16 10:12:44

cb474 wrote:

Hmm. I think it's getting over my head at this point. I'm not actually using Mate in Arch (I just haven't upgraded my Arch system since Gnome 3 came out, which may be a bad idea, but I'm still running Gnome 2).
I've fiddled with Mate in LMDE and regular Linux Mint instead and things worked fine once I enabled the plugins using the CCSM gui (although mate was still a little slow and clunky in some ways, compared to Gnome 2). I didn't want to get into all the configuration issues, by installling Mate in Arch.
All that to say, sorry I can't help you more on how to get Compiz working right. Good luck. I hope others have more suggestions for you.

Same here currently, when I encountered this problem with Compiz I reverted back to Ubuntu 11.04 + Gnome 2.

I tried the suggestions above in a virtualbox with Ubuntu 12.04 and with Ubuntu 11.04 as the virtualbox host.

As Ubuntu 11.04 will be unsupported by fall I hope to be able to move over to 12.04+ with Mate as my desktop environment as soon as possible.

Last edited by dotpointer (2012-05-16 10:13:19)

ryzion · 2012-05-16 21:23:10

Same here. There are no window decorations at all when activating compiz, no matter what decorator I choose. My mate-terminal doesn't show anything while running compiz.
window decorations are checked, as well as resize and move. Any Ideas?

cb474 · 2012-05-17 07:25:56

dotpointer wrote:

Same here currently, when I encountered this problem with Compiz I reverted back to Ubuntu 11.04 + Gnome 2.
I tried the suggestions above in a virtualbox with Ubuntu 12.04 and with Ubuntu 11.04 as the virtualbox host.
As Ubuntu 11.04 will be unsupported by fall I hope to be able to move over to 12.04+ with Mate as my desktop environment as soon as possible.

You may want to check out these posts, describing setting up Mate with Ubuntu 11.10. I'm assuming it should work with 12.04 also.

dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.com/2012/0 … te-in.html
dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.com/2012/0 … -with.html

The author of this blog found this setup to be the most like his previous Gnome 2 system. And he has some tips about getting Compiz working right. He's also very reponsive to comments on the blog, if you want to ask him questions.

I also just noticed that Mate now has its own wiki and forum, so that may be a good place to ask for configuration help:

mate-desktop.org

*

I personally found that Linux Mint (either Ubuntu based or LMDE) gave the easiest out of the box Mate set up. It worked fine. Compiz worked. And LMDE gives you a rolling release, so that's nice, and you don't have to worry about it becoming unsupported. There were just a couple things that were a little oddly slow, like tool tip boxes being slow to pop up and menus sometimes seeming slow (so pretty minor, not an important feature to me). Also, since I believe the Mint developers are actively working on Mate, I'm guessing that in the long run Mint will be the easiest place, perhaps most optimized place, to use Mate.

*

Another option is CentOS 6 (or the similar Scientific Linux). It uses Gnome 2.28. Worked great out of the box when I tried the live environment. Is super stable. And since it's meant for servers, I've read it gets ten years of support. It would not, I guess, have the most up to date packages in the long run, but it will continue to be supported. And I believe there are a lot of repositories with lots of packages for it. I don't really know that much about CentOS

*

I also just saw that Salix OS (based on Slackware) now has a Mate version. I've never used a Slackware distro, but I guess it's more in the spirit of Arch, so it could be nice. Don't know what the experience with Compiz would be like on it.

*

Last but not least is Fuduntu. This is the distro that most interests me right now, for using Gnome 2. It's was originally a fork of Fedora, but now is its own completely separate distro. They are maintaining Gnome 2, but otherwise it's a rolling release, so you get a sytem with Gnome 2 that remains supported and up-to-date. I found it to offer the best out of the box Gnome 2 experience of a current distro. It seemed snapper and smoother than Mate in LMDE. And Compiz works fine in Fuduntu (it's installed out of the box). Fuduntu's main limitation is that it doesn't have a huge amount of packages and you can't just install packages from Fedora, now that it's been fully forked. But the developers are very responsive on the forums to requests for specific packages.

*

Since I like rolling releases it comes down to me to LMDE + Mate, which basically works fine and you get access to the huge Debian repository of pacakges. Or Fuduntu, which is nice because it's just plain old Gnome 2, seems to work the best, but has some limitations on packages.

Hope those are some useful ideas. I am happy to see how many different efforts are being made to keep Gnome 2 alive and that there is clearly a large community of people who want this.

Last edited by cb474 (2012-05-17 07:33:18)

MisterAnderson · 2012-05-24 14:52:08

Hey, compiz will give you window decorations if you install "compiz-decorator-gtk" and run "gtk-window-decorator --replace" after starting compiz. Unfortunately, it installs and uses metacity instead of marco, if you can change that you're set.

ElderSnake · 2012-05-25 04:58:45

Is the Mate-indicator-applet available for Arch?

I know it's there in the OP's git hub but I looked in the Arch MATE repos and the AUR and couldn't see any sign of it.

If I have to manually build it from GIT that's okay, but just asking in case I've missed anything.

attila123 · 2012-05-25 07:18:23

I am going to evaluate mate as a possible Desktop Environment for me, and I tried to install it from the AUR. I got a few issues, which I summarized here: https://github.com/mate-desktop/archlin … s/issues/2

z0id · 2012-07-16 22:58:30

I reinstalled gnome today, but shell is tablet ui and fallback mode looks bad and has some quirks. I was just wondering, wouldn't it be much easier and make more sense to fork gnome 3 and maintain a usable fallback mode?
From screenshots, I see the guys at Trisquel made it look quite nice. Not sure how to accomplish that on arch, though.

Last edited by z0id (2012-07-16 22:59:20)

MisterAnderson · 2012-07-19 10:22:50

z0id wrote:

I reinstalled gnome today, but shell is tablet ui and fallback mode looks bad and has some quirks. I was just wondering, wouldn't it be much easier and make more sense to fork gnome 3 and maintain a usable fallback mode?
From screenshots, I see the guys at Trisquel made it look quite nice. Not sure how to accomplish that on arch, though.

There's already projects like Cinnamon that do this, so why would Mate just replicate it? Mate is here because some people think that Gnome 2 was better than Gnome 3 (including fallback mode) in many ways. It's also nice to not have to use the backup mode of a DE to get it to work close to how you want it to.

neighborhoodhacker · 2012-08-06 06:28:02

Hi all,
I want to start by saying thanks for the great work in maintaining the repo. I cannot get pacman to download the package database off of the site though. I know my $arch variable isn't set so I typed x86_64 on the end of the urls manually.

so here is what I get in terminal:

warning: database file for 'mate' does not exist
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
error: failed retrieving file 'mate.db' from matsusoft.com.ar : The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found
error: failed retrieving file 'mate.db' from tridex.net : Server denied you to change to the given directory

neighborhoodhacker · 2012-08-06 06:29:34

Thought this might be relevant so I post it.

it's my server entry in pacman.conf:

[mate]
# Contains official mate desktop packages (gnome2 fork)
Server = http://matsusoft.com.ar/repository/archlinux/mate/x86_64
Server = ftp://tridex.net/mate/x86_64

jeff story · 2012-08-09 04:03:41

Arch Linux Mate WIKI page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATE#Installation

WIKI wrote:

Installation
To install the stable version of MATE via pacman add the following lines to your /etc/pacman.conf:
[mate]
Server = http://repo.mate-desktop.org/archlinux/$arch
Run
 # pacman -Syy 
and then
 # pacman -S mate 

IMPORTANT INFO OMITTED FROM WIKI

As of 8/8/12, the mate group does not install the package mate-session-manager. Mate DE will NOT run without this package.

Run the following to save yourself the time I wasted figuring this out!

 # pacman -S mate-session-manager

BTW: I edited the WIKI

Last edited by jeff story (2012-08-09 04:04:47)

neighborhoodhacker · 2012-08-09 11:15:10

jeff story wrote:

Arch Linux Mate WIKI page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATE#Installation
WIKI wrote:
Installation
To install the stable version of MATE via pacman add the following lines to your /etc/pacman.conf:
[mate]
Server = http://repo.mate-desktop.org/archlinux/$arch
Run
 # pacman -Syy 
and then
 # pacman -S mate 
IMPORTANT INFO OMITTED FROM WIKI
As of 8/8/12, the mate group does not install the package mate-session-manager. Mate DE will NOT run without this package.
Run the following to save yourself the time I wasted figuring this out!
 # pacman -S mate-session-manager 
BTW: I edited the WIKI

Thank you soooooooooooooo much. I've wanted to try this out for a while. Now I've got the chance. Also, when I installed mate mate-session-manager installed also

Arch Linux

#501 2012-04-27 22:03:38

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#502 2012-05-08 17:27:19

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#503 2012-05-08 17:29:07

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#504 2012-05-08 17:31:00

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#505 2012-05-08 17:31:51

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#506 2012-05-08 17:33:19

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#507 2012-05-08 18:44:26

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#508 2012-05-13 00:16:11

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#509 2012-05-14 07:45:01

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#510 2012-05-14 10:15:31

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#511 2012-05-15 18:52:20

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#512 2012-05-15 20:33:24

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#513 2012-05-16 08:49:16

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#514 2012-05-16 10:12:44

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#515 2012-05-16 21:23:10

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#516 2012-05-17 07:25:56

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#517 2012-05-24 14:52:08

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#518 2012-05-25 04:58:45

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#519 2012-05-25 07:18:23

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#520 2012-07-16 22:58:30

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#521 2012-07-19 10:22:50

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#522 2012-08-06 06:28:02

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#523 2012-08-06 06:29:34

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#524 2012-08-09 04:03:41

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

#525 2012-08-09 11:15:10

Re: Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

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