[OpenIndiana-discuss] Mate is here (as well as new test ISOs)

[Alexander Pyhalov]

Hello, people.

I wanted to announce availability of Mate some time ago, but there were 
some issues, especially when I tried to build Mate Live CD. Good news is 
that now most irritating issues (or at least those which I found) are fixed.

So, let me introduce Mate 1.14. To facilitate installing, I've created 
pkg:/mate_install, which should be shortly available. Unfortunately, 
when you have both Gnome 2 and Mate installed, both of them try to use 
the same applications, so you'll have interesting time removing Gnome 2 
applications from Mate and vice versa.

Currently Mate packages are

desktop/pdf-viewer/atril
desktop/mate/caja
desktop/archive-manager/engrampa
desktop/mate/marco
desktop/mate/mate-applets
desktop/mate/mate-dictionary
desktop/mate/mate-disk-usage-analyzer
desktop/mate/mate-screenshot
desktop/mate/mate-search-tool
desktop/mate/mate-system-log
desktop/mate/caja/caja-extensions
desktop/mate/mate-backgrounds
desktop/mate/mate-calc
desktop/mate/control-center
desktop/mate/mate-icon-theme-faenza
desktop/mate/mate-icon-theme
desktop/mate/mate-media
desktop/mate/mate-notification-daemon
desktop/mate/mate-panel
desktop/mate/mate-session-manager
desktop/mate/mate-settings-daemon
terminal/mate-terminal
desktop/mate/mate-themes
desktop/mate/mate-user-guide
desktop/system-monitor/mate-system-monitor
desktop/xdg/menu-editor/mozo
editor/pluma
image/viewer/eom
library/desktop/mate/mate-desktop
# Not strictly mate, but gdm brings in too much gnome2
system/display-manager/lightdm
system/display-manager/lightdm/gtk-greeter

Known MATE issues:
- power management is based on upower (hal support removed), so it 
doesn't work (affects mate-applets(batstat), mate power manager)
- nautilus zfs integration uses illumos private interfaces and wasn't 
ported to caja
- compiz integration to GNOME control center uses gconf settings. To 
work with mate code should be migrated to gsettings
- GUI interface to reboot to specific BE is not preserved

As for LightDM, it worked for me, but there was one issue, which I 
didn't manage to catch:
- On some conditions when ligthdm is disabled, it fails to switch active 
VT back to /dev/vt/0. If you can reproduce it or have some ideas why it 
happens (and lightdm does it in sigterm handler), I'll be glad to hear.

Now, about ISOs:
They are available at http://dlc-int.openindiana.org/hipster/20160816/ , 
sha256 checksums are in 
http://dlc-int.openindiana.org/hipster/20160816/sha256sums.txt .

Two new image types: OI_MATE - this is Mate-based LiveDVD and OI_minimal 
(we tried to strip down OI a bit). One thing about minimal image - it 
doesn't deliver sudo, so initial user just gets root role. Note, these 
are test images and not official snapshots.

We would be glad for you to test them.

We'd like to hear your opinion, which images are necessary for next 
snapshot (supposedly, 2016.10). We think that minimal one, Mate and 
Gnome one are enough. We are going to avoid delivering Gnome ISO image 
after next snapshot (in 2017).

Also we are interested to hear if community needs VM images, and if it 
needs, then what exactly (qcow2, vmdk or something else).
-- 
С уважением,
Александр Пыхалов,
программист отдела телекоммуникационной инфраструктуры
управления информационно-коммуникационной инфраструктуры ЮФУ