Call for Testers: MATE 1.8
 

Right now, MATE is preparing for a major release of MATE 1.8 which will happen very soon (estimated Q1 2014).

To ensure best experience for every Slackware users, i'm calling for testers to test MATE 1.7 in MSB github repository which is very close to MATE 1.8. The only package that isn't updated for MATE 1.7 is mate-bluetooth, so you can remove that from mate-build-extra.sh before start compiling it or it will stop your process.

Please see the documentations before sending bug reports. Some known issues has been documented along with the fixes (if any).

We welcome any bug report, suggestion, patches, and feedback on this project. You are welcome to send us email at mateslackbuilds@gmail.com or use github's issue tracker or ask us directly on IRC (#msb / freenode).

When reporting, please give an information whether you perform a new installation of MATE or upgrade from previous version (1.6).

Thanks

Been testing it on my laptop since we last spoke. Working out great so far and can't really think of an issue yet. However, if I do, I'll make sure to report it here. Thanks for the hard work!

I've been using Mate-1.7 from MSB on my desktop intensively for a week now, so far, so good. Transition was very smooth (apart from mate-bluetooth stopping build process).

I can only say, that bug regarding black spaces in system tray, when few qt applications are launched, is still present. But that is not an issue of MSB (as it is known bug for mate developers). Other than that, all is great!

Thank you for your hard work!

@Totoro-kun: can you show some screenshot about the black spaces bug? I used Qt apps a lot, but never find this problem before

Sure thing, you can see it in attached file. Also, there is a confirmed issue on mate-panel github

I get the same thing under the HPLIP Status Service applet.

It seems there is a workarround for this!
Not much, I know, but works :D

Ha!

I used green laguna, and never saw this one :)

Just pushed some updates to base/ and also extra/ packages to 1.7.90

Will try these updates as soon as I can. Also tested GreenLaguna theme, but the issue is there for me :)

i saw them now on my workstation in the office, but not in my desktop at home :)

More updates on extra/ :

Willysr, did MATE 1.8 RC is supported on Slackware 14.0?

if you compile from source, then yes, but you will need to install itstool and dconf manually since it's only added in 14.1

Thank You for info!

I've tested new versions, everything built and installed fine. Mate-1.7.90 works nice in all my computers, however I am missing sticky notes applet. It seems it is not available, I hope only temporarily, as it is most used after battery monitor and clock :eek:

*EDIT*
I was able to get sticky notes applet back, by rebuilding mate-applets-1.7.90 package from extra and then reinstalling it. Maybe it is possible that mate-build-extra.sh is building it too early? So some applets fail, but if I rebuild this package again, after rest of the mate is installed, then all the applets are present and works fine.

I was able to build everything in base and extra. Will be testing those packages shortly. However, were you able to build yelp? I installed the latest webkitgtk from SBo, but the build quites complaining about:
Just wondering.

You need webkitgtk3 :)

Thanks for the bug report
I just checked the source and it seems it requires libgtop and gtksourceview to be present for some applets to be built
I will re-arrange the mate-build-extra.sh so that mate-applets will be build later on

Actually, I did install it and it still complained. I will take a look again and see what happened. Building webkitgtk took a very long time to build.

i have rearranged the order in mate-build-extra.sh so that all deps are now built first
i'm rebuilding everything on my clean VM right now
hopefully all is working great :)

Bah! I just caught on to the difference between webkitgtk and webkitgtk3. Sorry about that. I think I need new eye glasses.

willy,

Did you adjust the testing directory? I noticed that all the directories there are empty with the exception of yelp. Did you intend to do that?

Yes, it's all empty now
Pam and pam_unix2 are no longer needed and mate-screensaver is now moved to extra

The only thing left is yelp

Oh, good to know.

I can report right of the bat that the black underline issue from QT based applets on the panel is gone.

What theme do you use?
Some people still see it from certain themes, especially a light theme

It seems to me, that it doesn't matter which theme I use (tried all the themes I have), that black space is always there. On darker themes it is harder to see, that's all :) It's probably a leftover bug from gnome2. But it is interesting, that it happens not for all people, meaning there has to be some factor to bring out this behavior. Like I use Slack without KDE, so my QT apps are styled only by using System -> Settings -> QT4 Config (not sure if that makes any difference, but still).

yeah, it's DE spesific bug i guess...
anyway, i hope the re-arranged mate-build-extra should fix the sticky note applet problem :)

I've tried to build mate-1.7.90 on a clean Slackware64-14.1. Everything went very smooth and works very well. Re-arranged mate-build-extra.sh really did the trick.

Feel almost bored by everything working so well... Kind a slackly I guess :D

Thanks for confirming
I don't change the order in mate-build-base since i guess everything is already working there

I have had some problems to run mate-build-base.sh on x86-64 with alienbob's multilib installed. I tried to rename /usr/lib but then somewhere /usr/lib/libGL.la could not be found. Finally I linked /usr/lib64 with /usr/lib. I hope that all this will work when I restore /usr/lib.

Honestly, i don't have multilib VM on my system, so i can't give much support on it
It is more work on supporting multilib and it's not the official architecture from Slackware

But theoritically multilib should work as well since all of the packages can be properly built on x86/x86_64

I will try to install a new VM with multilib this weekend and see if i can add more support on multilib *no guarantees though*

The only problem with multilib is during compilation. After that, everything works well.

but linking /usr/lib64 to /usr/lib *could* potentially create problems for other package

I have used all the themes that used to give me problems, including the other ones. No issues at all.

I had the same issue with the sticky notes, even with the latest scripts. However, I think I figured out the problem. It was not the program itself, but the icon theme. Once I rebooted, everything was working fine.

Did you build it when you are on MATE desktop?
Before i tried to rebuilt, i logout to konsole and remove all mate packages including local config in .config, .cache, and .local
Well, it's a VM, so i don't have data there :)

After all packages gets installed, i don't need to reboot to see the sticky notes on the list of applets

Anyway, it's good to know that it's not a persistent bug....

I build all the packages on a clean virtual machine. I wonder if running:
instead of rebooting would do the trick? I may try that instead next time.

I think i missed that one on mate-icon-theme, so adding it to master branch now
Although it will be executed when you installed mate-icon-theme-faenza, but adding it to mate-icon-theme will give no harm

Thanks stormtracknole

No problem.

For those insterested if Mate-1.7.90 will build and work on Slackware-14.0 I can confirm that it will. Just built one for my little Thinkpad X41 (which is running Slackware-14.0), and its running great! Much faster than Xfce4!

Howerver, prior running mate-build scripts, you will need to install dconf, itstool, libsecret and older versions of pygobject3, libsigc++, glibmm, cairomm, pangomm, atkmm from SBo(14.0).

Now, there are newer versions of pygobject3, libsigc++, glibmm, cairomm, pangomm, atkmm in mate-build-extra.sh. So you will have to edit this file and remove entries for these as they will not build on slackware-14.0.

There is also a known issue in Slackware-14.0, that /usr/bin/xdg-open script does not recognize mate desktop environment. You have to apply patch. More info in this thread

Thanks for testing it on Slackware 14.0 :)

I have successfully done upgrade Mate 1.8 RC to Slackware 14.1, to my Dell Mini netbook 1018.
So far, so good.

New Mate is very fast.

It seems Mate 1.8 is now released!

Also it was a very nice surprise to find that msb repo is prepared for this allready. So I went ahead and built Mate 1.8.0 everything went fine, exept there was an error on gnome-main-menu-1.7.0, wget failed to download the source. Had to correct url in gnome-main-menu.SlackBuild:
Other than that, everything is nice and smooth, many thanks to willysr :hattip:

Should be fixed now and along with mate-screensaver which is now explicitely disabled PAM
please run git pull :)

Thanks for reporting

Just did built the latest set of packages for current64. The only issue that came up was that once the latest packages were installed, a bunch of x-caja.desktop windows came up once I logged in. It did not do this again after. Although the packages were built on a clean virtual installation, but home environment is probably not nearly as clean.

Just tried it on a newly created user with a clean $HOME and did not have that issue. So, it seems to be because of something in either .config or .local which related to an older version of MATE. Anyway, pointing that out in case someone upgrading has the same issue. :)

I tested on my laptop to upgrade from 1.6 to 1.8 and did not found the caja issue
Basically that bug is happening on other distro as well, but i minimized it by using --sync in caja.desktop