We’re proud to announce our newest package on GitHub:

• MATE University

MATE University is targeted at all levels of developers (including beginners) to learn how to develop new panel applets, Caja (file manager) extensions, Pluma (text editor) and Eye of MATE (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.

The mate-notification-daemon has a new feature in MATE 1.6 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 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.

FirstColo, operate a modern data center in Germany, and are planning to migrate to MATE Desktop on their office workstations. FirstColo have kindly donated a new dedicated server to support MATE.

All the team would like to thank Martin Verges and his staff for this great news!

We are now directing users to use the official Fedora package repository now. For instructions on using this repository please consult our installation guide for Fedora.

For more information about MATE’s official inclusion in Fedora, see the following:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MATE-Desktop

If you have any questions regarding installing MATE on Fedora then please ask for help in our #fedora-mate IRC channel or for general MATE questions join us in #mate IRC channel.

An Ubuntu package repository for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is now available for our 1.4 release. As usual, follow these instructions.

If you’re upgrading from an older release please make sure that you remove the old repositories and add the new ones, otherwise you will encounter problems.

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

Here are the main changes and improvements in this release:

• 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 as 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

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE 1.2. This release is a huge step forward since the 1.0 and 1.1 development releases. MATE is more stable than ever and it includes support for many more applications, applets and backends.

Here are the main changes and improvements in this release:

• Numerous bug fixes
• All conflicts with GNOME were fixed
• All configuration files were moved to ~/.config/mate
• An undo/redo feature was added in Caja
• Libmate’s mate-open command is now faster to open applications
• MATE settings daemon now supports the PulseAudio and GStreamer backends
• New applications: mozo (alacarte fork), python-caja, caja-gksu, caja-image-converter
• Artwork
  • MATE themes were renamed to avoid conflicts with GNOME
  • A new MATE wallpaper was added
  • MATE now features its own icon

We are currently in the process of switching to handling all our issues via the mate-desktop project on GitHub 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 repository to report the issue in. It’s pretty simple. If there’s a bug with mate-panel, then submit the issue on the mate-panel issue tracker.

We’ll are no longer monitoring Perberos’ issue tracker, so we ask that you refrain from opening new bugs there.

Thanks for your cooperation.

We’ve recently switched from a wiki at GitHub to a our own available from wiki.mate-desktop.org. Please reference this wiki from now on. Naturally, anyone is welcome to contribute.

For those of you who aren’t already aware, you can report issues on github. 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 Linux Mint, you can access the 1.1.x development branch of our packages using the tridex repository. Check out the download page on the wiki for more info. Linux Mint also has our 1.0.x release packages in their repository. If anyone is still using Amanas’ PPA, it is no longer supported. The rest of our 1.1.x releases will be hosted on the tridex repositories. 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.

Welcome to the MATE Desktop Environment!

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 have successfully run MATE on Arch Linux and due to popular demand Perberos made it easier for MATE to compile under Debian.

Stefano Karapetsas and Clement Lefebvre 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 their applications to this new desktop.