MATE 1.6 released

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The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6. This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE. We would like to thank every MATE contributor and user.

about

Main changes in 1.6 are:

  • Systemd-logind support:
    Added support for systemd-logind in mate-session-manager, mate-screensaver and mate-power-manager (now you can reboot/shutdown without ConsoleKit)
  • Caja (file manager) improvements:
    Improved places sidebar
    Added support for new thumbnailers specification
    Added a new frame for thumbnails
    Wallpapers are now cached for a better memory management
    New connect server dialog from Nautilus 3
    Added support for freedesktop.org File Manager DBus Interface
    Fixed back vs parent directory selection
  • Panel improvements:
    Added –run-dialog option to open the run dialog window
    Window list: you can use the mouse middle click button to close a window
    Workspace switcher: Added an option to wrap around between workspaces with the mouse wheel
    Added a simple way for distributions to override the default panel layout
    Unfortunately, due to migration to GSettings, you will lose your current panel layout. All other settings will be migrated if you have MateConf 1.4 installed.
  • Marco (window manager) improvements:
    Added option to open new windows on the center of the screen
  • Control center improvements:
    Added option to enable Marco compositing manager and fast alt-tab in window preferences
    Set GSettings/GConf metacity theme if compiz or metacity are running
    Use same GNOME proxy settings of gsettings-desktop-schemas package
    Default applications: allow to set default terminal
  • Atril (document viewer) improvements:
    Added XPS backend
  • Calc improvements:
    Updated codebase
    Added buttons to support inverse trigonomic functions
  • Notification daemon improvements:
    Added option to specify which screen to display notifications on
    Show always a notification if it has ‘expires never’ as timeout (also if screensaver is active or there are active fullscreen windows)
  • Themes improvements:
    New GTK2/3 themes (Menta, BlackMATE, GreenLaguna, TraditionalGreen)
    Added GTK3 support for other GTK2 themes (TraditionalOk, TraditionalOkTest, ContrastHigh)
  • Icon theme improvements:
    New theme with green folders (Menta)
    Enabled text preview for text files
    Added some new icons
  • Settings daemon improvements:
    Added support for MPRIS2 to send media keys to media players
    Added option to draw the background if caja is not active
    The daemon is now restarted by mate-session if it crashes
  • Caja open terminal extension improvements:
    Support opening a remote terminal
  • Netbook applet improvements:
    Enable maximus only when window picker applet is added to the panel
  • Dropped packages:
    Replaced MateConf with GSettings
    Replaced MateCorba/MateComponent with DBus
    Replaced MateVfs with GIO/GVFS
    Replaced libmatenotify with libnotify
    Removed deprecated packages: libmateui, libmatecanvas, libmatecomponentui, mate-mime-data
    Removed libmate (mate-open replaced with gvfs-open, GSettings schemas moved to mate-desktop package
  • Other improvements:
    Fixed a lot of code deprecations
    Fixed a lot of bugs
    Added and improved a lot of translations

We asked people from distributions that ship MATE what they think about our Desktop Environment.

George Vlahavas, Salix founder and project leader: “We believe MATE is a perfect match for Salix. MATE provides us with a familiar desktop environment that is powerful, solid and fast. Also, the MATE team are very friendly and a pleasure to work with and this means a lot to us. Thanks for giving us the choice of sticking with our favourite desktop guys.”

Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint founder and project leader: “It’s extremely important to us that people are happy with their computer. When that environment we all loved and worked hard to improve since 2006 was discontinued we weren’t happy to let it go and to ask people to migrate to something new or something different. We worked really hard on making sure our users could continue to use their computer the way they wanted and we met a team of like-minded people who had taken the initiative to support that environment and to develop it even further. Mint and MATE go hand in hand and the relationship between the teams is excellent. Mint played an important role in the promotion and backing of MATE and we continue to help with its development. We’re very pleased with MATE, it’s exactly what we wanted, it started where GNOME left off and with each new iteration it keeps getting better.”

Joost Ruis, strategy consultant of Sabayon: “We don’t like how upstream forced changes to users and want our users to have the option to decide what to use. With MATE in our repositories we are certain our users can always choose what works best for them.”

Dan Mashal, MATE maintainer in Fedora: “Ever since the release of Fedora 15 was released I was extremely unhappy and frustrated with my desktop experience until I discovered MATE. Now on Fedora I can finally have a desktop that is sane, stable, fast and most importantly easy to use. With the hard work the team has done to also patch compiz to work on the newer releases of Fedora I can now have my Fedora 14 (considered by most to be the best release of Fedora) experience back with wobbly windows, desktop cube, animations, and 3d effects. I can’t stress how big of a loss this was to many users including myself. Now with MATE I don’t have to worry about what is going to break with the next Gnome release and what crazy design ideas they are going to have making me have to relearn a desktop interface every single Fedora release. With MATE 1.6 I can feel right back at home on my favorite Linux distribution and get back to work.”

We also asked for a comment from the company who donated the server where we host MATE services.

Martin Verges, CEO of First Colo GmbH: “We are really happy to use the MATE Desktop Environment. This way we can keep a clean and well working desktop without lots of useless and distracting stuff. Until the end of 2012 our whole company were working with Ubuntu, but with the Unity Desktop and many other “end user features”, we were searching for new ways to get a desktop, free of software that pretends to make our lives easier. With MATE Desktop on Debian 7 Wheezy, we found a good working, high performance desktop that just works as we know it from years. We hope that the MATE Team will keep our classic Linux Desktop and bring to it new life some with new features, but with the good workflow kept in hand. So far, they have done great job, and we hope that soon the Debian Maintainers will add the MATE Desktop to their mirrors (and of course, that many others will use MATE too!).”

MATE 1.6 is the result of 8 months of intense development and contains 1800 contributions by 39 people, and more than 150 translators.
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New themes

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The team is proud to announce the new themes for MATE 1.6.

Menta will be the default theme for the upcoming new release. It consists of a nice GTK2/3 theme (based on Mint-Z Improved, no longer maintained, customized for MATE and updated for GTK3.6) and a child theme of mate-icon-theme with green folders.

Menta theme

Menta theme

There will be also other two new themes:

  • GreenLaguna: A nice theme based on green color.
  • BlackMATE: A black based theme, without green.

We would like to thank Wolfgang Ulbrich and Marcel Dijkstra for this great job.

Continue reading →

MATE and LTSP

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There are a lot of people in the world who get access to their GNU/Linux desktops via thin clients, and one of the longest running thin client projects out there is the LTSP project. The MATE desktop offers a fantastic desktop experience on thin clients; fast, stable, and efficient. Libraries, schools, and businesses looking for a GNU/Linux desktop using traditional paradigms their users are used to will find MATE a excellent alternative to going to a Unity/Gnome 3 desktop. As both an LTSP and MATE developer, I put together a short video on some of the developments in both.

MATE University

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c-file

We’re proud to announce our newest package on GitHub: MATE University! It will be targeted at all levels of developers (including beginners) to learn how to develop new panel applets, Caja (file manager) extensions, pluma (text editor) and eom (image viewer) plugins, etc. to expand the already powerful MATE Desktop experience.

There will be simple and well commented code, makefiles and tips to use as springboard for new MATE applications.

Changes to mate-notification-daemon

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In MATE 1.6 mate-notification-daemon has a new feature that allows users to select which monitor they want to display notifications on. The current behavior only displays notifications on the monitor which is currently active (where the pointer is). The behavior will default to as it has always been, but the user can change the settings by modifying the “use-active-monitor” and “monitor-number” keys in gsettings via dconf-editor, or they can run mate-notification-properties and edit their settings via a GUI.

Below is a screenshot of mate-notification-properties set for notifications to be displayed on an active monitor. Note that “Use Active Monitor” is selected, which disables the combobox for selecting a monitor.

active

Below is a screenshot of mate-notification-properties set for notifications to be displayed on a specific monitor. Note that “Use Active Monitor” is not selected, which enables the combobox for selecting the monitor to be enabled. The monitor number is set to 2. This will display on my third monitor, since counting starts at 0 instead of 1.

monitor

Fedora Repo

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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.

Pluma vs Geany Lite

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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.

MATE 1.4 released

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

 

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.