MATE (Tulisan tentang News)

Meet MATE's Mastermind

Stefano Karapetsas — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 22:17:32 GMT

I was fortunate enough to be invited on to Episode 347 of the Linux Action Show to talk a little about MATE Desktop, where it came from and where it is headed. The interview with me is embedded below.

I wasn't able to cover all the development objectives of MATE 1.10 in the time available so I recommend you take a look at the MATE Roadmap for a complete overview. If you should have any additional questions, or would like to contribute to the project, then we look forward to chatting with you in the #mate IRC channel or reviewing your pull-requests on GitHub.

Jupiter Broadcasting produce a number of weekly videocasts and podcasts mostly oriented around FLOSS. Take a look, you may find something that interests you.

Debian and Ubuntu package repositories removed from mate-desktop.org

Martin Wimpress — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:34:36 GMT

Thanks to the efforts of the MATE package maintainers for Debian MATE 1.8.1 is available in Debian Jessie (testing) and also Debian backports for Wheezy.

As a result of MATE 1.8.1 hitting the Debian testing repositories earlier this year, MATE 1.8.1 is also in the official archive for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. The Ubuntu MATE team have recently created a MATE 1.8.1 PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr at the request of the Ubuntu Technical Board and also a MATE 1.8.1 PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

If you require MATE packages for Debian or Ubuntu then the package repositories above are the official repositories to use.

We've removed the package repositories hosted on mate-desktop.org because some were unsigned and others have not been maintained for many months. Therefore, as of now, the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories hosted on mate-desktop.org have been removed.

MATE projects accepted for GSoC 2014

Martin Wimpress — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 06:14:31 GMT

After several weeks of review the application and selection period for the 2014 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is over. 4,420 students proposed a total of 6,313 projects for this summer. From those, 1,307 students have been accepted and the MATE Desktop project is one of the 190 Open Source projects that will be working with students this year.

In our second year as a GSoC mentor organisation the MATE team received 4 student proposals we were allocated 3 slots for student projects.

I'm delighted to introduce our GSoC students for 2014:

Avishkar Gupta will be working on adding ePub rendering capabilities to Atril, the document viewer of the MATE desktop.
Michal Ratajsky will be working on adding GStreamer 1.0 support into the MATE desktop environment in order to replace the dependency on the deprecated GStreamer 0.10 library.
Alexander van der Meij will be working on improving Caja extensions so they can be integrated during runtime and also create a single user interface for Caja extension configuration.

Please join me in welcoming these new contributors to the MATE team and wish them every success with their respective projects for the summer.

On behalf on the entire MATE team I'd also like to extend our thanks and gratitude to openSUSE who are our GSoC organiser for 2014. They did a fantastic job in helping secure these GSoC placements for the MATE team that will provide much need development resources to the project.

galculator is coming to MATE 1.10

Martin Wimpress — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 07:38:45 GMT

The MATE team is proud to announce that we are collaborating with the galculator team and that galculator will replace mate-calc in MATE 1.10.

What is galculator?

From the galculator website:

galculator is a GTK 2 / GTK 3 based calculator with ordinary notation/reverse polish notation (RPN), a formula entry mode, different number bases (DEC, HEX, OCT, BIN) and different units of angular measure (DEG, RAD, GRAD). It supports quad-precision floating point and 112-bit binary arithmetic.

galculator's main features include:

Algebraic mode, RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), Formula Entry and Paper mode
Decimal, hexadecimal, octal and binary number base
Radiant, degree and grad support
Basic and Scientific Mode
User defined constants and functions
Trigonometric functions, power, sqare root, natural and common logarithm, inverse and hyperbolic functions
Binary arithmetic of configurable bit length and signedness
Quad-precision floating point arithmetic
112-bit binary arithmetic
Copy and paste
Available in more than 20 translations.

Like MATE galculator has a commitment to GTK2 and GTK3 and is actively maintained.

Why ditch mate-calc?

While mate-calc is functional it lacks many features required of a modern desktop calcualtor. The MATE team is small with limited resources and where possible we are attempting to collaborate with projects that add value to MATE and reduce development burden on the MATE team. galculator is a perfect fit in this regard.

What's in it for the galculator team?

galculator will remain an entirely independent project but we hope that its inclusion in MATE will grow the galculator user base, raise awareness about galculator and attract new contributors to their project. To that end the MATE team will host the galculator translations as a resource on the MATE transifex project. We are hopeful that the ~300 heroic MATE translators will embrace galculator and add to the ~20 languages galculator currently supports.

I am a packager. What does this mean for me?

If you are a MATE package maintainer then start creating galculator packages for your distribution if they do not already exist and add galculator to your MATE meta packages or package groups. MATE 1.10 is a way off yet, so you have plenty of time.

Hopefully you undertand our reasoning and can see the mutual advantages for this partnership. Let us know what you think in the comments.

MATE Desktop singing the BlueZ

Martin Wimpress — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:45:00 GMT

The MATE team are delighted to announce that we are collaborating with the Blueman project and helping to update Blueman to BlueZ 5.x.

Why ditch mate-bluetooth?

mate-bluetooth supports BlueZ 4.x which has been discontinued and many distributions have, or are about to, replace BlueZ 4.x with BlueZ 5.x in their respective package repositories. Migrating mate-bluetooth to BlueZ 5.x was shaping up to be a lot of work and doesn't provide the range of features available in Blueman.

Why Blueman? Isn't it dead?

While the original Blueman project has stagnated, Christopher Schramm has reignited the development and started porting Blueman to BlueZ 5.x. While there is also some effort in updating Blueman to support BlueZ 5.x we feel it will provide a far better Bluetooth interface for MATE.

When will the updated Blueman be ready?

The observant among you may have noticed that the MATE 1.8 release announcement already mentioned that mate-bluetooth has been replaced with Blueman and the even more observant will also have noticed that a fresh version of Blueman has not yet been released. Yeah, we suck! Sorry about that.

While we acknowledge that we suck, we are actively contributing to the effort of porting Blueman to BlueZ 5.x and GObject introspection. We are hoping to have it ready in time for MATE 1.8.1 which is primarily intended as a bug fix release.

Can't you do it faster, damn it?!

Yes. Anyone familiar with BlueZ 4.x/5.x, dbus, PyGObject and PyGTK is encouraged to contribute via the Blueman GitHub repository.

MATE is participating in GSoC 2014

Martin Wimpress — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:14:31 GMT

The MATE team are very pleased to announce that we are participatiing in Google Summer of Code. We are doing this in partnership with our good friends at openSUSE

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code (commonly called as GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. GSoC works with many open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 7,500 successful student participants from 97 countries and over 7,000 mentors from over 100 countries worldwide to produce over 50 million lines of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

For students

The student application period is open from March 10th 2014 until March 21st 2014.

For assistance in how to apply please read the Google Summer of Code 2014 FAQ. If you are a student who wants to contribute to MATE via the openSUSE GSoC participation you'll what to check out the following:

In short the MATE GSoC project ideas for 2014 are:

ePub format support in Atril
GStreamer-1.0 support
Plugin system in Caja

As always, the key is to start early and to interact with mentors and the community at large. Fixing bugs, submitting pull requests and working on Proof of Concepts is a good way to get started.

The GSoC 2014 mentors for MATE are Stefano Karapetsas (stefano-k on IRC) and Martin Wimpress (flexiondotorg on IRC). The best way to communicate and interact with the MATE mentors is via:

We look forward to reviewing your applications!

MATE translation contributions requested

Martin Wimpress — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 12:51:31 GMT

Show your love for the MATE project this Valentines Day, shower us with translations!

Translators are the unsung heroes of the MATE development team and once again we call upon them to help improve the project. MATE 1.7 is well into final testing and QA and soon MATE 1.8 will be prepared for release.

Therefore we request that you check the status of the MATE translations you contribute to at Transifex and update them ASAP.

https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/MATE/

If you are not yet a member of the translation team but would like to help then please sign up for a free account at Transifex so you can start contributing to MATE, we'd really appreciate it!

There are currently 6 languages with 100% coverage, so lets see how many more can get 100% coverage before the MATE 1.8 release.

MATE Desktop Roadmap Reshuffle

Martin Wimpress — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 06:43:12 GMT

A few days ago Stefano Karapetsas posted an announcement on the mate-dev mailing list outlining the decision to reshuffle the MATE Desktop roadmap.

Essentially GTK3 support for MATE has been pushed back to MATE 1.10 because there is still a good deal of work to be done to get it really stable. Therefore MATE 1.8 will continue to be based GTK2, although GTK3 applications integrate nicely just as they did in MATE 1.6. The updated roadmap is available on our wiki:

MATE Roadmap

This decision was made because the current development version of MATE is stable, incorporates many new features, improvements and bug fixes. We want to get all that "good stuff" ™ out to our users so they can benefit from the advancements we've made sooner.

You can read the original mailing post and follow-up comments below:

[Split MATE 1.8 roadmap]

The feedback we've had so far about this decision has been positive. What do you think?

Stefano presents MATE at FOSDEM 2014

Martin Wimpress — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 14:16:13 GMT

On February 1st 2014 Stefano Karapetsas presented his talk on MATE at FOSDEM 2014!

The talk introduces MATE to those who haven't heard of it and explains the projects origins. The differences between MATE and other traditional GTK based desktops is covered and then Stefano goes on to explain how MATE has evolved since it was forked from GNOME2. A brief run down of the recent improvements is covered followed by an overview of the MATE roadmap and other projects that benefit from MATE such as Sonar, Raspberry Pi and LTSP.

MATE Desktop Mythbusting

Martin Wimpress — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:17:32 GMT

I was fortunate enough to be invited on to Episode 26 of the Linux Unplugged podcast to talk a little about MATE Desktop and where it is headed. The MATE Mythbusting clip is embedded below.

I wasn't able to cover all the development objectives of MATE 1.8 in the time available so I recommend you take a look at the MATE Roadmap for a complete overview. If you should have any additional questions, or would like to contribute to the the project, then we look for to chatting with you in the #mate IRC channel or reviewing your pull-requests on GitHub.

Jupiter Broadcasting produce a number of weekly videocasts and podcasts mostly oriented around FLOSS. Take a look, you may find something that interests you.