MATE for Raspbian

[john.mills]

Hello all,

I was just reading on the Mate web site that version 1.4 has been released on the 30th of July. It has a lot of new features that sound interesting. I was wondering if it would be possible that the new version could be compiled for Raspbian? I know this will probably be a couple of days compilation but it would be great to see this in the respoisitory. On an interesting side note MATE is going to be finding its way to Fedora quite soon.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/ ... 55987.html

Best regards and thanks,

John

The new features include:

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

Taken from :
http://mate-desktop.org/

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.

[ejsolutions]

Just a little bump, to see if any further progress has be made by anyone.
(Is it time for me to create a compiling environment on my poorly specced laptop?)
It would be handy if this thread was stickied, given the importance of MATE to the desktop experience.

[ejsolutions]

Has anyone made any further progress on this project?

[mpthompson]

I was just reading on the Mate web site that version 1.4 has been released on the 30th of July. It has a lot of new features that sound interesting. I was wondering if it would be possible that the new version could be compiled for Raspbian? I know this will probably be a couple of days compilation but it would be great to see this in the respoisitory. On an interesting side note MATE is going to be finding its way to Fedora quite soon.

I'll see what I can do over the next week or so. Unfortunately, building MATE is a bit of a chore on our build infrastructure as I need to temporarily re-purpose a build system to build the binaries into a separate repository I maintain just for MATE.

I'll post back when I have new binaries to try out.

Mike

[mpthompson]

OK, I've reconfigured one of the Raspbian build servers to build the MATE v1.4 packages. The builds are just now beginning. Building the earlier version of MATE went very smoothly and I'm crossing my fingers that this newer version MATE will build without major problems as well. If things do go well, hopefully new versions of the MATE packages will be ready in 24 to 48 hours.

[ejsolutions]

Once again, many thanks for your efforts. It's really appreciated what you do for the community.
I began my first foray into compiling a kernel on this low-spec laptop but reckon it's going to be quite some time before I'm any where near up to speed with this stuff (if at all).

[Montala]

OK, I've reconfigured one of the Raspbian build servers to build the MATE v1.4 packages. The builds are just now beginning. Building the earlier version of MATE went very smoothly and I'm crossing my fingers that this newer version MATE will build without major problems as well. If things do go well, hopefully new versions of the MATE packages will be ready in 24 to 48 hours.

Thanks Mike... that was quick work, and all sound very encouraging!

I am sure we will all be keeping our fingers tightly crossed... and 'watching this space' for your next update!

[mpthompson]

Quick update. I've got all the 1.4 binary packages built and installed on my local repository. I'm going to update the pisces-mate image just to test everything out before pushing the repository to our public server.

Unfortunately, the pisces-mate image is now a bit long in the tooth and the upgrade process will take several hours on an SD card. Eeesh.

Anyway, I anticipate the binaries going live on Friday.

[john.mills]

Hello Mike!

It is nice to see you back on the forum once again, I have to say that I haven't been on here as often due to a few personal reasons at home. So I take it that you are releasing an updated MATE +PISCES image? Could I make a small request regarding installing by default some of the applications we mentioned a while back in the discussion thread? Netsurf, Pidgin and possibly a mail client? I have found their performance to be acceptable in general on the older image. Again I think it would be a good idea that the image auto load X.

On a side note I have to confess I didn't check again but did Libre Office ever build for Raspbian? If not how about Calligra Office 2.5? Just openly wondering about performance in MATE... I think I read some where it worked well in the LXDE image.

Anyway, thank you Mike and it is very good to see you here again. I wish you a great day!

John

[ejsolutions]

Fantastic news. Thanks for the update.

[mpthompson]

So I take it that you are releasing an updated MATE +PISCES image? Could I make a small request regarding installing by default some of the applications we mentioned a while back in the discussion thread?

I have indeed created a new Pisces+MATE R2 image and it's being uploaded right now. Unfortunately, it will be an update of the older image with nothing being added beyond a full update of all Raspbian and MATE packages. The sad truth is that I really need to greatly reduce the amount of time I've been putting into Raspbian so I can concentrate on some other career and work related endeavors. I'm hoping that other members of the community can step forward and create references images of MATE with right mix of optimizations and applications to increase its appeal. All the pieces should now be in place in the repository.

[john.mills]

Hello Mike,

That is understandable, I know that Raspbian has taken a whole lot of your time. As you said the pieces are in place to create a new community focused image, although the best solution would be that the Raspberry Pi foundation move to create a desktop focused MATE release that would meet the needs of a school or college user. The performance and application selection could be tailored to meet this goal. I believe the foundation are currently missing a huge opportunity here and one that wont be repeated again for a long time.

One request though, is it possible that you make this thread sticky? I think it is important enough that is is not lost among all the noise on the Raspbian forum.

Thanks again Mike and best regards,

John

[mpthompson]

The version 1.4 MATE packages have been compiled and moved to the Raspbian public servers. If you are a current user of MATE, a usual "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" process should upgrade your installed version 1.2 of MATE to version 1.4. Beware, it will take a while as every single MATE package will be upgraded. Additional information regarding the installation of MATE can be found here:

http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianMate

I've also create an updated version of the Raspbian Pisces+MATE image that includes the version 1.4 MATE packages that can be downloaded from here:

http://www.raspbian.org/PiscesMATEImages

I've checked things out and I believe the repository is complete and the packages install OK, but let me know if there are any problems.

Enjoy.

[john.mills]

Thank you Mike!

[Greebie]

Was just coming on to see if there was any news as, doing a apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade this morning downloaded a whole load of new stuff regarding MATE.

Didn't take too long to pull down, configure and install. Screenshot shows 1.4.0 running relatively happily (can be a bit "clunk" but the same problem occurs with xfce, guess it's down to having no hardware acceleration yet) via tightvncserver.

[ejsolutions]

Excellent work and very much appreciated.

[mpthompson]

Screenshot shows 1.4.0 running relatively happily (can be a bit "clunk" but the same problem occurs with xfce, guess it's down to having no hardware acceleration yet) via tightvncserver.

Yeah, "clunk" is an apt description. I run MATE from an SD card configuration when creating the images for others to use. I find that when I run MATE from a USB hard drive its performance really isn't too bad. I guess MATE and other X desktops are sensitive to SD card performance on the Pi. I suspect LXDE greatly minimizes file I/O to keep it pretty snappy on the Pi.

[Mr.Dave]

Screenshot shows 1.4.0 running relatively happily (can be a bit "clunk" but the same problem occurs with xfce, guess it's down to having no hardware acceleration yet) via tightvncserver.

Yeah, "clunk" is an apt description. I run MATE from an SD card configuration when creating the images for others to use. I find that when I run MATE from a USB hard drive its performance really isn't too bad. I guess MATE and other X desktops are sensitive to SD card performance on the Pi. I suspect LXDE greatly minimizes file I/O to keep it pretty snappy on the Pi.

Before seeing this thread I flashed your latest MATE image and was playing happy for a while, I did some updates (I forget which now, nothing major) and I rebooted, when it rebooted I was prompted for pisces login: and no matter what I entered there, it would never ask me for the password, it would continuously ask me for the login which I tried any number of different things for and they all resulted in the same login prompt reappearing !

I'm back on Wheezy atm, but was wondering is it is bug or something I did

[mpthompson]

Before seeing this thread I flashed your latest MATE image and was playing happy for a while, I did some updates (I forget which now, nothing major) and I rebooted, when it rebooted I was prompted for pisces login: and no matter what I entered there, it would never ask me for the password, it would continuously ask me for the login which I tried any number of different things for and they all resulted in the same login prompt reappearing !

Hmmm. I've never seen this behavior before from any image I've ever worked with and I can't explain what might be causing it. Have you tried logging in via SSH? I don't know if that would work any better, but it might.

[MichaelIP]

Hello,
New user of a Raspberry Pi, I've installed yesterday the lastest image for MATE following instructions on http://www.raspbian.org/PiscesMATEImages. All has been fine for the installation and I could use MATE for a few moment.

Memory left once Mate is running is near the indicated values (I have 137 Mb of free memory and I think I could earn some precious Mb by customizing correctly the Raspberry).

Using Mate is from my point of view more user-frendly than using LXDE. I also did not notice that MATE is slower than LXDE for the use I have. But, I spent very few time using either LXDE on a previous install and using MATE on the newly one.

The real problem I faced is about the keyboard which often repeats by itself the last key I typed ! It is really frustating spending minutes to connect to the machine... It has been fortunatelly more efficiant to use ssh to connect and configure the based installation of MATE.

I meanwhile had a real problem while updating the installation. apt-get is looking for packages on archives.raspbian.lan which has never been found yesterday ! I don't know where the problems come from, but I haven't been able to update the installation, nor installing NetSurf. I won't be able to spent time until friday, but I hope I'll manage finishing the installation and will go back to you for more positive feedback.

Many thanks Mike for this excellent work which I hope will help me achieving my project too !

Best regards.

[mpthompson]

Thanks for the feedback. MATE is slower and consumes more resources, but there are things that can be done to make it consume less resources. Some of the easier things to speed up MATE are documented here: http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianMate Other things would be disabling services which are unneeded and such.

'archive.raspbian.lan' is the internal Raspbian repository on my LAN. I must have accidentally left that enabled in the MATE image. I'll take a look at that and fix the image. Sorry for that mistake.

The keyboard issue is some weird interaction with the USB driver. I don't think it has anything specific to do with MATE. I've experienced it before and it seems to be related to keyboards that have built-in low-speed USB hubs to plug a USB mouse into the keyboard. I ended up using a PS2-to-USB adapter to plug my keyboard and mouse into the Raspberry Pi and that did the trick for me to eliminate keyboard issues.

[MichaelIP]

Hi Mike,
Concerning the keyboard issue, this is due of course to my keyboard and not related to Mate. My keyboard has several led for multimedia purpose. Knowing that each led needs at least 20 mA, it must be too much for the raspberry. I tried during lunch time today another USB keyboard with only the 3 classical led and I did not have any problem using it.

For the 'archive.raspbian.lan' issue, the /etc/apt/sources.list contains these invalid sources. The correct sources (archives.raspbian.org) are just commented. For those who have this problem, commenting the unwanted sources and enabling the correct one should solve the problem. I meanwhile could not test it has I'm not allowed to use the network at office for the Raspberry.

For the memory left, I will try to earn some precious Mb using the link you mentioned and also using some tips of the following page: http://extremeshok.com/blog/debian/rasp ... ory-usage/.

Be sure I will go back to you if I can save memory.

Once again many thanks for all that excellent job.

[mpthompson]

'archive.raspbian.lan' is the internal Raspbian repository on my LAN. I must have accidentally left that enabled in the MATE image. I'll take a look at that and fix the image. Sorry for that mistake.

I've updated the MATE image to have the correct package source URLs in "/etc/apt/sources.list". Please let me know if there continues to be a problem.

[Montala]

'archive.raspbian.lan' is the internal Raspbian repository on my LAN. I must have accidentally left that enabled in the MATE image. I'll take a look at that and fix the image. Sorry for that mistake.

I've updated the MATE image to have the correct package source URLs in "/etc/apt/sources.list". Please let me know if there continues to be a problem.

Thanks Mike,

Just clarify, are you saying that you have just updated the download link to Pisces+MATE R2 Image on raspbian.org, or have I got that wrong?

Thanks!

[mpthompson]

Just clarify, are you saying that you have just updated the download link to Pisces+MATE R2 Image on raspbian.org, or have I got that wrong?

Correct. The /etc/apt/sources.list file in the Pisces-MATE R2 image was updated. Nothing else changed in the download.