Wheezy and MATE

Yesterday I heard of someone running MATE on Debian wheezy, which is something that I've been wanting to do myself. MATE is a fork of Gnome 3, essentially going back to Gnome 2 but updating it slightly, and today I logged into it. And it works beautifully! I've long had a gripe at Gnome 3 for a broken 'Nautilus', their file manager, in that it only showed text files, then shell scripts, and then anything else, whereas I just wanted it all in alphabetical order. Which MATE does, although they've renamed Nautilus to 'Caja'! I don't know what it means, but it operates exactly as I want, for once.

If you want to run MATE under wheezy too, then put these lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list -

# main repository deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/debian wheezy main
# mirror deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/debian wheezy main

Then -

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core ;; this installs the base packages
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment ;; this installs more extras

Let it all run and the dust to settle, then log out off your present desktop environment, and log into MATE, and then just configure the desktop as you like. I like having a weather applet for a local aerodrome to see the coming and impending weather situation, along with a volume control for when I play my music. And the MATE volume control applet actually looks like a speaker too, instead of the Gnome 3 amorphous blob which looked like nothing on earth!

All in all, MATE runs very nicely and I like it, I hope you'll give it a try and like it too?