Planet MATE

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.

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

Anyone up for creating a ‘Team Fedora‘ for geo-caching? It would be awesome to have such a global community engaging on geo-caching!

Whom from the Ambassadors team could provide guidance and make such thing happening? Any fellow geo-cachers around ?

Salix OS team released their MATE 13.37beta1 edition, available for 32bit and 64bit.

Download link is in this Salix OS forum topic.

From Salix OS website:

Here is the first beta release of our new Salix edition, using the MATE Desktop Environment. For anyone not familiar with MATE, it’s a GNOME2 fork, that continues development of the GNOME 2.x branch. MATE uses the traditional desktop metaphor that was abandoned for newer GNOME 3.x releases. There was a lot of work involved by the MATE developers with forking MATE and most issues that appeared due to forking have been ironed out. The desktop experience provided by the MATE Desktop should now be on par with that of GNOME 2.32.x, with the added advantage that MATE is actually actively developed.

All of the GNOME parts that have been forked have been renamed, so that they don’t conflict with GNOME 3.x applications, but otherwise the functionality and behavior is exactly the same as it was in GNOME 2.32.x. For example, the Nautilus file manager is now named Caja in MATE, the Evince document viewer is now Atril and the File-Roller archive manager is now Engrampa. These forked applications will probably play a much bigger part in future Salix versions, for other editions as well, especially if Slackware doesn’t decide to move to GTK+3, which is highly unlikely.

Installation from these ISO images is performed using the standard Salix installer. These are not LiveCDs. The installation is identical to that of any other Salix edition and provides the option to make a Core mode installation, a Basic mode installation or a Full mode installation. The Core mode installation is identical to that present in all other Salix editions, it will only install a command line system, no GUI applications or environments. The Basic mode installation will install a very basic system with the MATE Desktop Environment, the Firefox web browser and the collection of Salix system tools, including the Gslapt package manager and Sourcery Slackbuild manager and not much more than that. The MATE Desktop Environment is as minimal as possible in a Basic mode installation, it only includes the Caja file, the MATE preferences tools and a few panel applets. A full mode installation includes everything that is present in the ISO images. That includes a full MATE Desktop Environment with all panel applets, the Atril document viewer, the Engrampa archive manager, the MATE power manager, MATE system utilities and more. The collection of software included in a Full mode installation resembles that of other Salix editions, especially the Xfce edition, including the Libreoffice suite, the Claws-mail emailing application, the Pidgin instant messenger, the GIMP image editor etc. Of course all Salix system tools that make system administration easier are installed, as in all other editions.

LMDE Update Pack 4 is out with the upcoming MATE 1.2 release. MATE will be the default desktop in the ISO, too.

This is a great news for MATE Desktop, thanks to the Linux Mint devs.

Links:

• Update Pack 4 is out! [The Linux Mint Blog]
• LMDE Update Pack 4 and alternatives to Gnome 2 [The Linux Mint Blog]

We added official MATE repository for Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04).

deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu/ precise main

Installation guide in the wiki.

For quite some time (over a year) that I lurk on Fusion Linux mailing lists for plain curiosity… Yesterday Valent asked on the mailing lists if anyone could help with some packaging and issues that needed to be done, since I had a bit of free time and the issues were something I was quite confortable with (thanks to Vincent Untz which ‘lectured’ me sometime ago about gsettings overrides), I’ve decided to give some help.

Gsettings allows vendors to override the default settings with a very easy system, people just need to drop a file with ‘schema.override’ on %{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas and run the respective scriptlet on %posttrans and %postun to update/merge the deployed file.

The cool thing about this is that this settings will be applied system wide and every single new user will inherit these changes (also existing users running the default settings, ex: gdm).

Not much of a challenge but in a few hours I’ve packaged a few packages for Fusion Linux:

• faience-icon-theme (based on previous openSUSE packaging I had done);
• faenza-icon-theme (based on previous openSUSE packaging I had done);
• gsettings overrides package;
• Fusion default wallpapers (dependency for the branding package).

Now I can go back to my business again and my own Linux remix, Moniz (currently based on openSUSE 12.1, with a big change to actually be released based on Fedora 17… we will see).

Everyone knows that users are often looking for the “easy way”… A perverted experiment… The main goal is an application that installs the repositories that people might be looking for… with some options available… I’m not sure how going to conduct this thing… but it starts somewhere… For now a minimalist UI so I can get some inview about handling signals and how to integrate stuff up… For the rest… we will see later…

From some time that I’ve been working on ‘Moniz’ after Martim Moniz. Moniz is meant to be a Linux remix which defaults to European Portuguese, and will be based on GNOME 3 with Cinnamon by default (GNOME Shell is also available). There’s also some intention to make this more ‘Iberian’ compatible, which means that the languages spoken in Spain should be supported in the Future.

Thanks to Tatica, we have now a logo for the Project, which is taken from the Coat of Arms of the Portuguese Founder, King Afonso Henriques (Afonso I), from whom Martim Moniz was one of his best friends and Knights.

A Plymouth theme should also come within the next days!

Thanks Tatica!

Cinnamon 1.4.0 is available since the release date to openSUSE 12.1 users and provides a pure upstream Cinnamon Desktop experience. Currently Cinnamon is a set of two packages that are served through the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) project GNOME:Cinnamon:

• cinnamoon – a shell replacement for the upstream GNOME3 gnome-shell, forked from gnome-shell 3.2.1;
• muffin – a window manager forked from mutter 3.2.1.

Users subscribed to GNOME:Cinnamon repository have the update to 1.4.0 available since the release day (a few hours after the release was tagged on git), and new users can use the YaST2 Meta Installer to install Cinnamon.

Currently Cinnamon is only available for openSUSE 12.1 and openSUSE Tumbleweed. The installation procedures are covered on openSUSE Cinnamon wiki page.

Cinnamon 1.4.0 in openSUSE 12.1

Cinnamon 1.4.0 has been officially released, as such, it has been updated on GNOME:Cinnamon. This new release features a lot of things:

• New features:

• New expo/scale overview;
• New “Settings” applet and “Panel Edit Mode”;
• 39 supported languages;
• New Menu editor based on Alacarte;
• etc…

• Applets improvements;
• Window list improvements;
• etc…

The whole list is available on the upstream link. Current subscribers of GNOME:Cinnamon repository will get automatic updates.

For quite sometime that I’ve been playing with some custom configurations of rpmlint for personal purposes (not all of the upstream cool stuff really is something I want).

I’ve made a tiny Python script from some examples I’ve found here and there on the internet. It does work up to a small extent, but not quite good as expected. Basically what it does is, it picks up a repo where some RPMs might be and creates a ‘logs’ dir if it doesn’t exist… It checks RPMs with rpmlint and currently is using the rpmlint file logging. Cool stuff, when I use “-i” it doesn’t write the extra information (though on stdout it’s there). I guess somehow I need to move to subprocess logging…

Either way… Anyone has cool ideas on how this can be improved? (not really seeking for the magic recipe, a few pointers on the right direction would probably help, maybe some examples… My knowledge with Python isn’t really that great, neither with object oriented programming, but I’m quite enjoying the experience).

#!/usr/bin/env python

import fnmatch
import os
import sys

base_repo = "/opt/repos/"

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(base_repo):
    for f in files:
        if fnmatch.fnmatch(f, "*.rpm"):
            # create 'logs' directory if doesn't exist so we can log there
            if not os.path.exists(root + "/logs/"):
                os.makedirs(root + "/logs")
            ffile = os.path.join(root, f)
            flog = os.path.join(root, "logs/" + f + ".log")
            # log into the 'logs' directory
            if os.path.exists("/usr/bin/rpmlint"):
                try:
                    if os.path.exists(flog):
                        os.remove(flog)
                    os.system("/usr/bin/rpmlint -i --file /opt/rpmlint/config.test --rawout=" + flog + " " + ffile)
                except IOError as e:
                    print "Error: rpmlint not found, please install rpmlint..."
                    sys.exit(1)
sys.exit(0)

Last year I’ve decided to purchase a license of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (self support) to use on my home laptop. For a few years that I had not used Red Hat (or clones) for Desktop. I don’t find expensive at all the 45€’s that Red Hat charges for 1 year license, specially considering that I really don’t have to worry much about security (as the updates flow in quite nicely)… But here’s a few things I found about Red Hat Desktop:

• Awesome kernel… right out of the box my laptop was behaving as expected, much for my surprise suspend was working out of the box, unlike many recent distributions with more recent kernels;
• GNOME 2 installed pretty much everything I needed, with a feature that I do value a lot, Evolution was supporting MAPI all the way (unlike other recent distributions, but I guess that’s related to not having a working SMB4 implementation for Evolution 3);
• Access to compilers to rebuild a few packages that are nice to tweak Desktop, for example the Murrine GTK+ Engine (the default theme isn’t really that nice, but I guess it wasn’t made to be nice since it’s a Enterprise release);
• Plymouth has a very nice theme, irrelevant for production servers since no one sees it, but it’s nice on a Desktop, a very good implementation (which is hard to see outside Fedora and Red Hat distributions);
• Good support from Hardware vendors. I’ve downloaded ATI Catalyst from the AMD site and created an rpm with the driver which worked flawlessly. Now there was a itch here which made me file a bug report, Red Hat Enterprise Linux doesn’t provide ‘rpm-build’ package which is required to build the RPM for the ATI Catalyst. I’ve snagged the one from CentOS and installed it, no issues at all. Regarding the bug report it was reviewed by Red Hat and it suggests it’s a Future Feature for RHEL, which is good for this situations;
• 10 Years more of GNOME2, which is always nice to have around.

Like a few people mentioned in the past… There were cheaper options like CentOS, Scientific Linux or maybe Debian… But I’d rather feel that those 45€’s are Red Hat’s hand and that they can help finance development in cool areas where Linux needs… It’s really a nice product for Desktop users (lacks maybe more attractive visuals), it’s a bit sad that there’s no GOjbect Instrospection (not even as a technology preview), but it’s understandable.

Well if you like GNOME2 and you really want to help with Linux development, I would say, dare to go Red Hat Enterprise Linux!

I’ve announced in the openSUSE Factory mailing list that I was going into a ultra-low profile in the future as I expect to increase my volume of contributions in other project. I’ve also requested my membership to be terminated. This has really no impact on the Cinnamon presence in openSUSE because I will still continue to provide updates for it.

I’m not submitting Cinnamon to Factory anymore, and anyone who wants to do it, I don’t mind having them as co-maintainer. Just drop an email to: nmarques [at] fedoraproject [dot] org.

We have a new DNS where we’ll host MATE packages for various distros. It’s hosted by schneida of tridex.net.

You can replace the MATE repository with the new DNS, or leave tridex.net without problems.

deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/debian wheezy main

deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu oneiric main

Upgrading to mate-settings-daemon-1.1.1, we readded support to gstreamer (instead of pulseaudio) for media (volume) keys. So, now MATE dont requires PulseAudio.

Now there are two packages that provides mate-settings-daemon:

• mate-settings-daemon-gstreamer (default): uses gstreamer to provides media keys.
• mate-settings-daemon-pulse: uses pulseaudio to provides media keys.

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.

We ported two new plugins to Caja:

• caja-image-converter: extension to mass resize or rotate images
• caja-gksu: privilege granting extension using gksu

Both plugins are already packaged for Debian/Ubuntu in tridex repository.

Caja 1.1.0 has nice Undo/Redo feature, taken from nautilus-elementary.

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.

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

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.