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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.