MATE for Raspbian

[SheepWillPrevail]

Thank you so much for this, this is way better than LXDE. I think it works pretty decently on the 256MB model.

[omiez]

Sorry for the question, if i download the installer from here: http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianInstaller

Will i have a system booting Mate?

[john.mills]

Although this image is a little old you can still download from here:

http://www.raspbian.org/PiscesMATEImages

http://archive.raspbian.org/images/rpi_ ... ate_r2.zip

I am not sure that this would still be the best method for you to try MATE with Raspbian now. I can say that MATE is very good and for me runs well. It wouldn't be a bad idea I suppose to work on a new version. I spoke with Mike about this a few months back.

I haven't really been busy on these forums for a while. I believe that Alex Bradbury also mentioned in the past that he would release a new foundation image that contains MATE. I don't know if he has any intention to do so but an 'official' foundation image would be the best solution if this would ever come about. I'd personally really like to see this myself. I believe that MATE still provides a better desktop experience for the average user than LXDE does.

[ejsolutions]

I too, would like to see an update.

[Lobo Blanco]

Thank you very much for carrying Raspberry kill, it seems more useful than LXDE.

I'll test it thoroughly in my Model B 256MB.

[tpprynn]

I'm more or less a layman, and I don't know if Mate for Raspbian is ongoing, but how much of wanting it over LXDE is aesthetic, how much also about thinking LXDE is functionally significantly inferior due to what you're used to? In the run-up to getting my Pi I'd been using LXDE more and more despite months with Windows 7 and 8, Cinnamon and KDE. Differences in use of the file manager no longer irritate me and as you can see from the attached picture, with some tweaks LXDE can look... less utilitarian. I'd been using it with Metacity for the borders instead of Openbox, and xcompmgr for shadows and fades*** to bring the desktop to life. I think additionally kids who may receive a Pi who spend some time on parents' Macs wouldn't find it too much of a drop in luxury with such a set-up. Despite the option of the quad core Windows 7 machine across the room, currently ignored, if there is any performance drop to be annoyed by it's minimal. Hopefully my post here is of interest to anyone who'd started to look into Mate wanting to up the eye candy a bit without too much gimmickry though I know my contribution isn't too hardcore...

***Once xcompmgr is installed, this line is added to the LXDE autostart file:
@xcompmgr -CcfF -I-.15 -O-.03 -D1 -t-1 -l-1 -r3 -o.32

[BrianXP7]

Any chance of a MATE 1.6 build?

[mpthompson]

For those interested, the MATE packages for Raspbian have been upgraded to version 1.6 and should install for both Raspbian Wheezy and Raspbian Jessie (the testing version of Raspbian). Information for installing MATE can be found at the following link:

http://raspbian.org/RaspbianMate

Sorry this took so long, but hopefully some people will find it useful.

Mike

Any chance of a MATE 1.6 build?

[john.mills]

Hello Mike,

It is great to see you posting on the forums once again. Thank you very much for the MATE update, I will give it a try tonight when I get home from work. I hope that you are doing well yourself?

Thanks and regards,

John

[DrKawashima]

Looking good.
I might try this, since i think even the most highly customized LXDE themes still all look worse than Windows XP

[Trust2Fire]

I am loving the Raspbian Mate img.
Thanks so much, this is such an improvement over lxde.

Just some things I noticed. Maybe it's just me.

When I run vnc on the viewer computer all I get is a gray screen. Is there a problem running vnc with mate raspbian?
Also under my /boot directory the file config.txt is empty.
How do we go about overclocking?
What about raspi-config program, seems to be missing?
How do I go about setting the video memory split?

Perhaps my install went wrong or something?

Everything else works great so far.
Very happy with it otherwise.
Wondering if I could install the Network Monitor app/w widget, the nice one that gnome 2 had that made making changes to the network settings such a snap.

Hey thanks for everything
Ron

[Trust2Fire]

Another problem i'm having, maybe someone can help.

I'm trying to compile the drivers for my wifi usb card. Belkin n750

The problem I'm having is installing the linux kernel headers so that make will work.

I'm running 3.10.18+
I had this driver running on my raspberry pi when I was running the normal lxde raspbian, and I had found a website were someone had .deb file for the 3.6.11+ headers and it was easy enough for me to install them.
But I can't find any such thing for the 3.10.18+ kernel.

Can anyone please help.
Thanks
Ronnie

[Trust2Fire]

Bump, still having problems with the afore mentioned items.

Apart from that I was wondering if there is a way to boot strait into mate.
Instead of booting to the command prompt.

Thanks for the great work.
Ron

[theoph]

Hi all guys.
I need your help.
I tried to change my DE from LXDE to MATE.
I follow this guide
http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianMate
I added the repository into my sources.list and I installed MATE packages.
Now, why every time I run

Code: Select all

startx

LXDE start ?
How I have to do to start MATE ?
I have to configure lightdm ? Can anyone tell me how ?
Thanks in advance to all

[theoph]

by Evilbadger » Mon Jun 25, 2012 8:58 am
When I installed MATE on my basic Raspbian install I followed your instructions here.

I noticed your instructions had this part TBD...
Running MATE automatically at boot time
TBD [Haven't figured this out yet.]


The MATE project have not yet released their own X display manager, so you need to install a separate display manager. (I would recommend LightDM)
Once that is done it should auto-magically go to the graphical login menu at startup.

I have also followed this guide.
How have you configured lightdm?

[mike632t]

It has been a while since I posted anything as I've been busy 'playing' with my Pi in what little spare time I have.

I've been running with MATE on my Pi for some time and have not got around to updating anything. I probably should update more often but have not had any problems and it was working so I decided to stick with the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' approach.

However, yesterday I wanted to install some more packages so I did an 'apt-get update'. I probably should have stopped there and just installed the additional packages but I decided to do an 'apt-get upgrade'. I did notice that a lot of the MATE packages were being updated but wasn't exactly suprised and thought I'd install the newer version to see what it was like.

Some time later after the updates had been applied I noticed there was a comment that the mate-window-manager package was no longer required so I did an 'apt-get autoremove --purge' to get rid of it.

Unfortunately after rebooting the desktop is broken - no panels, just the desktop icons, and desktop fonts are a mess.

I'm assuming that the repository now includes MATE 1.6 and I'm guessing that the default window manager for MATE has changed with the more recent version but can't find any clues here (http://mate-desktop.org/blog/2013-04-02 ... -released/ - doesn't mention the window manager)

Should I delete my current settings folders after the update to ensure I have a clean install? Do I need to install an alternate window manager?

Thanks

[mike632t]

Looks like this is a known problem (or two) with the upstream code.

I fixed missing panels by using the file browser to manually run /usr/bin/mate-panel, then added the application menu and other missing applets, before selecting the option to save running applications on logout and logging out - that got the missing panels back.

The desktop font issue is 'fixed' by selecting an image as the desktop background, not ideal but it works!

Mike T.

[angico]

I've always been a fan of the Gnome 2 desktop and I'm working on a side project to port MATE, a fork of Gnome 2, to Raspbian. I also like what Linux Mint has done with MATE. More about MATE can be found here:

http://mate-desktop.org/

I realize it will almost certainly be heavier weight than LXDE or Xfce, but I'm hoping that it will still run decently under Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi. Of course, it will run much better if and when an X server that implements GPU acceleration is available.

So far, I've built about a half dozen source packages with only a few glitches. Hopefully, the other 40 or so will build as easily over the next two or three days. I'll post back here when I have a repository available that others can install and test out the MATE.

I hope there are other fans of MATE that would like to see this classic Linux desktop environment available on the Raspberry Pi.

Hi!

I've just installed MATE on my RPi and am now trying to enter de DE, but I just can't get the mouse nor the keyboard to work. Any hints on circumventing this problem?

Thanks!

[mike632t]

I've written up some instructions to show you how to install a minimal MATE desktop on both the Raspberry Pi and any PC running Debian Wheezy here http://mike632t.wordpress.com/2014/02/2 ... ling-mate/. Many thanks to the mate-desktop team (and the Raspbian guys)!

Note - There is seems to be a small problem with the way the fonts on the desktop are displayed - solved by selecting a desktop wallpaper image rather then a plain colour background.

Mike T.

[mike632t]

Read the instructions here if you are upgrading from 1.4 to 1.6 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/M ... 1.4_to_1.6

[smartmeister]

Hello,

I would like to know if mate-desktop comes also in different languages in the archive.raspbian.org/mate repository ?

I can't seem to find how to switch from english to french...

I went into the raspi-config internationalization options menu and changed my locales from en_GB UTF-8 to fr_FR UTF-8 and fr_FR ISO-8859-1, but it didn't work.

Also for some reasons, updating repository through APT always tries to retrieve "Translation-en" packages specifically.

I'm a bit puzzled (to say the least). What am i missing ?

Thanks in advance.