MATE 1.6 Released, Install It In Ubuntu [GNOME 2 Fork]

After 8 months of development, MATE 1.6 has been released yesterday and its Ubuntu and Debian repositories have been updated a few hours ago with the latest MATE desktop. The new version comes with many changes such as Systemd-logind support, Caja (file manager) improvements and more.

MATE 1.6 is "a giant step forward from the 1.4 release" according to the MATE developers and with this release, many deprecated packages and libraries have been replaced with new technologies available in GLib.

For those not familiar with MATE, this is a GNOME2 fork which lets you use the old GNOME 2 desktop interface and applications but it also allows you to use new applications so for instance, you can use Nautilus 3 with it and so on. Also, MATE can be installed in parallel with GNOME 3, something that wasn't possible with the vanilla GNOME 2.

Changes in MATE 1.6

Caja, the default MATE file manager has received some interesting improvements, including support for new thumbnailers specifications and a new thumbnails frame, a new connect server dialog backported from Nautilus 3, the sidebar has been improved and there were many bug fixes:

The MATE panel Window List now supports middle clicking to close a window and the workspace switcher now has an option to wrap around between workspaces with the mouse wheel.

MATE Control Center has received some improvements too, including an option to enable Marco compositing manager and fast alt-tab window preferences and others.

Another interesting change has been made to the Notification Daemon which now has an option which allows users to specify on which screen the notifications should be displayed on and there's also support for notifications that "never expire".

Other improvements in MATE 1.6:

• added support for systemd-logind in mate-session-manager, mate-screensaver and mate-power-manager (now you can reboot/shutdown without ConsoleKit);
• MPRIS V2 support to send media keys to media players;
• Caja now supports opening remote terminal;
• other changes and bug fixes.

BlackMATE theme

GreenLaguna theme

Furthermore, MATE 1.6 ships with new GTK2/3 themes: Menta (seen throughout most of the screenshot of this article), BlackMATE, GreenLaguna and Traditional Green and there's a new icon theme as well: Menta. Also, GTK3 support has been added to some of the existing themes: TraditionalOk, TraditionalOkTest and ContrastHigh.

With version 1.6, MATE has transitioned to some new packages: GSettings has replaced MateConf, DBus has replaced MateCorba/MateComponent, GIO/GVFS has replaced MateVFS and libnotify has replaced libmatenotify.

Here are a few more MATE 1.6 Desktop screenshots:

Install MATE Desktop in Ubuntu

MATE is not currently available in the official Ubuntu / Debian repositories but it seems it will make it soon because it's currently on Debian ftp-master new queue.

Ubuntu 12.10, 12.04 and 11.10 users can install MATE Desktop by using its official repositories. To add the repositories and install MATE, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://mirror1.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core mate-desktop-environment

Then, log out and select MATE from the login screen.

Note: for some reason, in my test, the MATE Notification Daemon wasn't installed by default so if that's the case for you too, use the following command to install it:

sudo apt-get install mate-notification-daemon

I've also seen some Raring packages in the MATE repositories so it seems Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail will be supported soon.

For other Linux distributions, see the MATE installation wiki page.

Removing MATE

If you've installed MATE in Ubuntu using the commands above and you want to remove it, use the command below in a terminal:

sudo apt-get remove mate-archive-keyring mate-notification-daemon atril atril-common caja caja-common engrampa engrampa-common eom eom-common gir1.2-mate-panel libatril libcaja-extension libmarco libmatedesktop libmatekbd libmatekeyring libmatemenu libmatepanelapplet libmatepolkit libmateweather libmateweather-common libmatewnck libmatewnck-common marco marco-common mate-applets mate-applets-common mate-backgrounds mate-calc mate-control-center mate-core mate-desktop mate-desktop-common mate-desktop-environment mate-dialogs mate-icon-theme mate-media mate-media-common mate-media-gstreamer mate-menus mate-panel mate-panel-common mate-polkit mate-power-manager mate-power-manager-common mate-screensaver mate-screensaver-common mate-session-manager mate-settings-daemon mate-settings-daemon-common mate-settings-daemon-gstreamer mate-system-monitor mate-terminal mate-terminal-common mate-themes mate-utils mate-utils-common pluma pluma-common

And to remove the MATE repositories, use:

sudo add-apt-repository -r "deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo add-apt-repository -r "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo add-apt-repository -r "deb http://mirror1.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo apt-get update