don't forget to take care of those renamed/removed packages

I removed those as well and everything is good.

Is there a pointy-clicky 'System Info' tool for Mate as there is in Cinnamon?

Edit: Sigh. Never mind. The System Monitor has a tab that displays equivalent information.

I have just pushed caja-1.8.1
This should finally fixed the multiple x-caja window instances

1 members found this post helpful.

I have to say that I like mate better than xfce or kde.

I've just installed mate 1.8 using and, as a big KDE fan, I hate to say, it is very good.

So to give it a fair chance I removed XFCE and KDE, this brought to light a problem. There is no login manager included with MATE 1.8, so I installed gdm from slackbuilds.org

Is there, or is there going to be, a recommended login manager for MATE?

samac

MATE can work with any kind of login manager AFAIK. I tried with SLIM once on Arch and it also worked.
What we tried to do is to provide the desktop environment on top of a complete installation of Slackware so that we don't need to add more package (e.g. login manager) for MATE besides their main packages.

I understand what you are trying to do, but in order for a desktop to be complete it should include a login manager. For example what if someone just installs a basic system without KDE and XFCE, they are left with the very ugly and not very useful XDM.

Please consider including gdm as you would not even have to change /etc/rc.d/rc.4

Remember that usability is an important part of the entire experience.

samac

@samac:
we assume the users are using a full installation of Slackware 14.1, not a custom or mixed environment.
This way, it's easier for us to debug the problem if there are problem reports.

I didn't say much until now, but for the past couple of weeks, I've been quite busy rebasing my MLED project on Willy's and Chess' MATE desktop rather than Xfce. My approach has simply been guided by pragmatic considerations, and for the purpose of creating a full-fledged Windows desktop replacement, MATE has finally turned out to be the better candidate, after a few false starts.

Nothing's uploaded to the repos yet, but if you take a peek at the various ChangeLog.txt files of my Github (git clone https://github.com/kikinovak/slackware), you'll see there's much work under the hood. ETA is roughly two weeks from now, I'd say, possibly even a bit less, depends on my workload. I'm taking special care of making everything as clean and bug-free as possible, so there's a lot of spring-cleaning involved for many SlackBuild scripts.

Apart from that, MLED will basically be a complete MATE desktop where nothing's missing: corporate artwork, integrated GDM, reasonable choice of best-of-the-breed applications, full set of multimedia codecs and plugins, plays nice on old hardware, etc. The beta version is already running on my main PC, and it's a bit reminiscent of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or a classic CentOS 6.x desktop, only with Slackware under the hood. I've been working on it exclusively for the last two weeks, and it makes for a nice workflow without getting in the way. I'll be so bold to say you'll like it.

Cheers,

Niki

PS: picture of work in progress included to get a rough idea.

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@kikinovak

Quite a while ago I had a look at your scripts to see how you modified the Slackware install and I liked what I saw, but didn't try them out. I will definitely try out your MLED based on MATE.

I wonder if you have considered making a MLED download script based upon Alien Bob's mirror-slackware-current and an excludes file. I did this a while ago and you can use it, not only to exclude directories but also, individual packages. This would mean that people would only be downloading and installing the bits you wanted before adding your enhancements on top. It would save running the remove packages script.

samac

Looks like Slackware 14.0 will be supported too?

Yes. One of the reasons why this is a lot of work.

@samac:
GDM will require more deps included in MSB and since it's already provided in SBo, we will let the user to install it from SBo. Another problem with GDM is that newer version can't be installed due to unsatisfied deps from Slackware and SBo.
The current version in SBo was from 4 years ago.

IMHO, it would be better to complete on one release 14.1 first, and then going with 14.0 next
This way, you can focus the work on one release, and while people enjoying for 14.1 (which should be easier and faster because it has more complete basic libraries), you can start working on 14.0 release