Hi,

I've decided to start this thread to centralize information about MLED: news, bug reports, suggestions, etc. Various threads on LQ contain outdated information about MLED, so here's a fresh start. First, some updates.

MLED 14.1 32-bit:

MLED 14.1 64-bit:

MLED 14.0 32-bit:

MLED 14.0 64-bit:

From now on, please post all questions, comments, bug reports and suggestions about MLED in this thread.

Cheers from the sunny South of France,

Niki

PS: I took some time to update these, since for the last few weeks I've been busy with a lawsuit against a far-right journalist.

You have been a naughty boy, but the cause is just. I have voted with my wallet.

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Thanks you very much, David. And also to Eric. I've sent you both emails. A local radio station has aired the story on Thursday, and I'm getting a heart-warming amount of support here in France.

I'm hoping to (finally) implement MLED on a bunch of WinXP boxes at work soon, so I will report back here if anything comes up. Thanks for all of your hard work, Niki.

Speaking of which, do you have any experience running Filemaker Pro via WINE? This will be a key issue for me to get people switched over.

I never tried MLED but it looks awesome

No, not really. I really try to use only FOSS stuff. When there is the odd piece of software that hasn't (yet) been ported to Linux, like some specific accounting software, I'd rather install a single Windows box in the network than jump through burning loops and make it work under Linux.

^ Yes, I can definitely understand that. I'd love to see them migrate from Filemaker Pro to MariaDB or something, but realistically, I don't see that happening.

Thanks. MLED can be described as "What's missing in Slackware to get a complete bells-and-whistles Xfce desktop." It's not a spin-off distro, only a collection of additional packages.

Although I have previously mentioned the issue, I wonder how fix it definitely here...

The corresponding line in /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache is

and although I have re-ordered it several times (plus removed the redundant "gimp.desktop;" at the end of the line) to get PDFs opened by default in evince, it somehow reverts so as to offering me to open such files in inkscape.

Do you have any suggestions?

Each desktop seems to have its idiosyncrasies. Right now I keep wondering why the MATE desktop environment keeps trying to open folders with Audacious. WTF ?!?

Perhaps because of this annoyance?

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BTW, I'm running the latest MATE 1.8 in two different (32-bit and 64-bit) virtual machines, and I must say it's love at first sight. I recreated my MLWS-14.1-{32,64}bit project folders, and since my existing build scripts are mostly automated, I guess I'll soon have a MATE-based alternative to my Xfce-based project. I'm using Willy's and Chess' binary repos, so no need to reinvent the wheel. So far, I did some trimming, rewrote all the menus and added some eye candy.

While maintaining three different desktops (KDE, MATE, Xfce) was too much work, I think Xfce and MATE will be doable, the more so since they have quite some stuff in common. I'll keep you posted.

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Some news from the MLED front, and a question to all the users who are following this project.

Since Willy and Chess published some pre-built MATE 1.8 binaries for Slackware 14.1, I've spent quite a lot of time playing and experimenting. First I installed it on two separate VMs, then I even replaced Xfce on my main workstation with MATE. I've been working with it nonstop for the best part of a week. Well, it looks like this is the superior desktop base for my MLED project, for a host of reasons. First things first, here's a screenshot to get a rough idea:

http://www.microlinux.fr/images/MLED_MATE.png

I can already draw some first conclusions. My Xfce-based MLED project suffers from a series of flaws, which would all be ironed out by a move to MATE. In the past I've been a big fan of GNOME2-based enterprise desktops like CentOS 5.x and 6.x, Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

My gut feeling now tells me that the best thing for the MLED project would be a move to MATE as main desktop environment. Of course I wouldn't start from scratch and reinvent the wheel. I would simply build upon Chess' and Willy's excellent work, and then add about 150 extra packages, the full Monty as usual: extra libs, plugins, codecs, fonts, apps, everything needed for a complete Slackware desktop.

Since this is a quite significant change, I'd like to ask your opinion about this. Here's what I'd like to do.

1. Replace Xfce by MATE as main desktop
2. Clean up the repositories
3. Backport everything to Slackware 14.0

Cheers,

Niki

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I take this as a chance to thank you also for your work. I'm using your packages to make my desktop experience more complete and beautiful in addition to Eric's packages and managing that with slackpkg+.

I haven't used MATE a lot and therefore I don't know much about it. XFCE is at least a stable platform to build on, but I'm sure you know best what to do. So if you think MATE would fix those some problems you're having, then go for it.

I would prefer to have MATE alongside with XFCE instead of picking one of them
Since XFCE is already included in Slackware, the maintenance burden is minimum (unless you try to jump to newer version when it's available)
Users can also have more options when picking up their DE.

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