CentOS 8 Mate?

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Without wanting to sound too pushy, I’m wondering if there is any update on the status of Mate now that CentOS 8 has been released?

I would love to jump on C8 and start playing with it, but the lack of Mate is kind of a showstopper for me at the moment.

76 thoughts on - CentOS 8 Mate?

  • If the availability of a particular desktop environment is a showstopper, then perhaps RHEL and CentOS are not the best choice for you. RHEL 8 has dropped KDE, never mind Mate. Providing and maintaining alternative desktop environments over the (long) life cycle of CentOS 8
    will require a

  • Liam O’Toole wrote:

    WHAT?!?!?!

    I *loathe* gnome, and it just keeps getting more bloated and worse.

    When I’m ready to install 8, I’ll have to see if icewm is updated for it.

    mark

  • That may be, but in view of the fact that you can even get a version of CDE that works (very well) on CentOS 7 (https://github.com/dcantrell/cderpm if you’re interested), I find it difficult to believe that a widely used and mature desktop like Mate will just disappear on a widely used and mature Linux distribution like CentOS.

    And since I’ve been using CentOS for everything for a lot of years I’m not in a hurry to change to something else if I can avoid it.

    If that isn’t being organized by someone at this time, I would be frankly surprised.

  • Nothing has changed since the September 16 answer I gave:

    This is more of a question for the EPEL lists versus here. The current status is that desktops are harder to package up in EL8 and only a less feature version is available at the moment. At the moment the only one I know of is KDE is half implemented in EPEL Playground and will be reimplemented as a module when EPEL gains the ability to do modules. At that point interested people can also do the work to make Mate/Cinnamon/etc available.

  • Thanks ever so much for the update, even though as you say nothing much has changed.

    Perhaps now that more people have their hands on CentOS 8 and can work with it the folks who know what they’re doing for getting desktops running on EL8 (and I’m definitely not one of them) will be able to make further progress.

    I sincerely appreciate the update, though. Since Mate is widely used, I suspect other folks who follow this mailing list would also be interested progress reports and release announcements when and if something becomes available.

  • Le 24/09/2019 à 23:09, Frank Cox a écrit :

    For what it’s worth, I’ve been using CentOS on servers and desktops for years, since 4.x. Even published a book in France about CentOS on the desktop, based on 5.3, which sold 3.000 copies.

    Last december I decided to part ways with CentOS on the desktop. It’s still running on all my servers (and those of my clients). Right now I’m figuring out CentOS 8.0 on a sandbox server, taking notes and reading the RHEL 8 documentation.

    But on the desktop, I’ve switched to OpenSUSE Leap, and I’m a happy camper now. I can highly recommend it. Sports every major and minor desktop environment under the sun, and it’s a nice blend of semi-rolling releases based on a rock-solid SLES base.

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

  • I moved servers from CentOS to FreeBSD… but workstations and number crunchers are all CentOS

    I tried SUSE around ver 7. Memory leak in code run as unpiveleged user was consistently crashing stock SUSE installation. Whereas downloaded and build kernel from kernel.org (with all default options) on the same SAUSE box successfully killed offender with OOM killer, and was standing like a rock. I never came back to SUSE. Incidentally, I consider it counter productive what SUSE does about configuration: keeps all configuration in a single yast file; you change one component, yast touches all actual configuration files… counter productive, will take you a lot of effort to figure what changed on a given day if something went wrong after that day. Couldn’t figure one funny thing too: why Germans would use English abbreviation Yet Another System Tool for yast ;-)

    Valeri

    —
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • I’m not suggesting that it will. A few years ago, soon after the source code of CDE was released, I downloaded, compiled, and installed CDE in a CentOS 6 VM. Why? Because I could. But would I conduct any serious business in that environment? Of course not. And why is that? Because it receives no enterprise support.

    It could well be that someone is organising it. On the other hand, it could be not. Either way, it will not be supported by RHEL and CentOS. What happens when a critical vulnerability is discovered in that software? Who will notify you of it? Who will fix it?

    At the time of writing, Mate in EPEL 7 is still at version 1.16. The upstream version is at 1.22. Have any critical vulnerabilities been fixed in the meantime? I have no idea. Do you?

  • I was thinking I might as well go back to Windows, but that’s pretty much the same thing.

    Right now I’m rather dismayed by RHEL/CentOS 8. I was hoping to skip CentOS 7 and go straight from 6 to 8. But right now there’s just too much missing in version 8. I can’t tolerate the Gnome 3 desktop, and the lack of VM snapshot capability is a total deal-breaker for me. It’s looking like CentOS 6 will go EOL before version 8 is usable for me. I might end up switching to Mint.

  • Why do you need “every major and minor desktop environment under the sun”? I run CentOS desktops/laptops since 5.3 and even rebuilt 70+
    packages for it, even Skype rpm.

    All I need for work that feeds me is one good work environment and that is MATE. All tray icons are visible so I can see if message or mail comes without need to move more then eyeball. And stablity of CentOS
    makes it best option even though versions of apps are not latest and greatest, it is enough they do the job needed.

  • FWIW icewm (uses an XWayland session) is available in EPEL-testing for CentOS 8. I’ve tried it out and it seems very stable, I’ve had no issues with it.

  • Le 25/09/2019 à 08:18, Ljubomir Ljubojevic a écrit :

    In France we call this “voir midi à sa porte”. See noon at your door.

    I’m a die-hard KDE user, but over the years, I’ve probably used every DE/WM under the sun (my first one was WindowMaker on Slackware 7.1).

    Discussing “best DE/WMs” is probably as pointless an exercise as discussing the respective merits of soccer clubs or motorcycle brands.

    If you like Cinnamon, your best bet is probably Mint. On the other hand, KDE users are probably better off using OpenSUSE or Neon.

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

  • Hello,

    I’m in a total agreement too. Mate (or xfce) on top of CentOS brings me a desktop I can work in. Work means: as a dev station at work – amongst other things because it’s close to the RHEL 8 system, which is one of the reference systems we have in our customers community. Works means also: use it as a dev and workstation at home.

    Long time ago I was using xfce, because it was behaving almost like gnome2 and was able to get gnome applets in its tray (that was a major one), I think it has lost this ability, at least last time I tried it, this was not possible.

    If Mate will not be available for CentOS 8, I will consider this:
    – building Mate from the sources myself (yeah, w/ all deps)
    – xfce or icewm from repositories.

    For now, I’m postponing my CentOS 8 use until:
    1) the live system is available, because I need it to see how it boots and installs on the target systems I have (where CentOS 7 was a total failure – only Ubuntu/Deb were OK),
    2) we know if Mate is available or definitely not available from third-party repositories.

    Regards,

  • I am guessing that because CentOS releases only every 3-5 years, people forget how much work is done at the beginning of every release. First there is a lack of packages available. Then there is the complaining that the OS is useless because it doesn’t have ABC. Then there is finding the people who are challenged enough by the lack of packages to go learn how to package up stuff and make it available. Then there is a section where packages get uniform and together. Then things pretty much stay at that until the next CentOS major release… people either decide they want to skip to the next or just wait it out.

    So currently we are in the finding out the lack of packages and the complaining stage. The real challenge will be finding the people who see that as a challenge versus a show-stopper and do the next steps.

  • Ohh, I am not openig that can of worms :-)
    Just like Windows Clasic on Windows 200/XP/7, I liked Gnome 2 on Linux, and logical move, closest thing after Gnome 2 was dropped, was MATE. Shiny icons, transparency and smooth menu’s are things I disable because they distract me from actual work. Any DM that fits my work demands I
    will use without complaining.

    —
    Ljubomir Ljubojevic
    (Love is in the Air)
    PL Computers Serbia, Europe

    StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant

  • I’m not sure that’s a huge threat to CentOS, they’re quite different.

    CentOS 7 really only supported GNOME3, largely because Red Hat is so involved in GNOME development. MATE support on CentOS 7 suffered because newer versions were hard to get to work on such an older base. CentOS 8’s modularity actually might make multiple DE’s easier to support in EPEL, given time.

  • As of now, I have a working MATE DM on CentOS 8. It’s a hack though, I
    used Fedora repositories. But that means compiling MATE in EPEL should be straightforward, just recompile Fedora 28 packages.

    I used Fedora 28 repo file and Fedora 28 GPG keys (links are bellow), unpacked then to proper directory and in Fedora repo files I changed
    “$releasever” to “28”. I also installed yum-plugin-priorities and in all CentOS repo’s added
    “priority=1” and in all Fedora repos added “priority=2”.

    Then I ran following commands (something like this, I experimented some):

    yum install python2-six yum install mate* -x mate*devel* -x mate-menu yum groupinstall “MATE” –skip-broken yum groupinstall “MATE Desktop” –skip-broken echo “exec /usr/bin/mate-session” >> ~/.xinitrc reboot and then selected MATE in login screen.

    Links to rpm’s:
    https://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/28/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/f/fedora-repos-28-1.noarch.rpm and https://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/28/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/f/fedora-gpg-keys-28-1.noarch.rpm

    List of installed packages from Fedora 28: https://pastebin.com/VXL03Uqj

  • that’s all true!

    Despite my public whining, I am aware that Mate comes from epel, not CentOS.

    I also tend to wait as much as a year after a .0 release until many of the installation or usage issues have been hashed out and understood, so by then there is likely to be a Mate as well as other DEs available.

    Fred

  • And even better: there are UNIX (BSD rather) descendants too, so there is even more choice ;-)

    Valeri

    —
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Ding, Ding, ding, Ding .. Right Answer!

    If you want it … package and build it when building on 8 becomes available via CBS to SIGs. Should be early next week.

    Community part of CentOS is available for you to get involved in a SIG
    and build whatever you want to build. The question is ,, is someone going to do it.

    Thanks, Johnny Hughes

  • Once upon a time, Robert Nichols said:

    The capability is still there and works just the same as before. The only change is that the new preferred tool for graphical VM management, Cockpit, doesn’t yet support making snapshots. virt-manager is still there for now (presumably until Cockpit grows all the necessary support), and the underlying virsh support hasn’t changed.

  • Once upon a time, Chris Adams said:

    To add: I forgot that virt-manager snapshot functionality already didn’t work in RHEL 7, because of upstream support changes and underlying libvirt complications. While it is possible to manage snapshots directly with libvirt (via the virsh CLI tool), it’s a little complicated to do and the layered tools don’t support it (at least not yet).

    AFAIK, this isn’t anything new with RHEL 8, it’s just documented now.

  • With the new initiative CentOS and Fedora Stream, wouldn’t it be easier collaborate with Fedora SIGs to bring an updated version of Mate to CentOS

    I am not an expert here, I am very happy with GNOME but if there is anyone that will like to kick off the alternate desktop count me in.

  • So, creating a snapshot with “qemu snapshot -c …” still works as before. Good. Frankly, I was wondering how they had managed to break that function of the QCOW2 storage format.

  • I managed to install F28 MATE packages to CentOS 8, so all is needed is to recompile those in EPEL.

  • Le 25/09/2019 à 00:24, Valeri Galtsev a écrit :

    SUSE 7 goes back to 1994. It’s fair to say the distribution has gone a long (!) way since.

    OpenSUSE Leap is an interesting mix of base system + X11 based on SLES, a bit like CentOS is based on upstream Red Hat. On top of that, you get the latest stable releases for KDE, GNOME, LibreOffice and applications and packages galore in some kind of semi-rolling release.

    I’ve been running OpenSUSE Leap KDE on all my client’s desktop computers, including our local school, and it’s a crisp and clean and rock-solid workhorse. I’m also running it on my workstation and on my old MacBook Pro, in replacement of Mac OS.

    On servers I’m still a die-hard CentOS user.

    I’ve written a detailed blog article about choosing an OS, based on past experiences.

    * https://www.microlinux.fr/choix-os/

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

  • I too am a solid fan of MATE. F28 had v1.16. F30 has the latest v1.22. Is there any reason I should not try the latest? Perhaps some dependencies not available in C8?

    –Doc Savage
    Fairview Heights, IL

  • I really do not know. It was written RHEL 8 was based on fedora 28/29, so those packages should be closest to EL8. I had no time to play with packages from newer Fedoras, and I even did not know about difference in versions because all I evev use on ANY Linux PC is to install latest CentOS, never ever any other distro. I did fix some Ubuntu’s but never installed any.

  • Ljubomir,

    So far so good. Had some problems breaking “whatprovides” for ‘system-
    release’ when I manually relinked it to ‘fedora-release’. I had to manually install fedora-update.spec pointing only to ‘updates’.

    [root@server02 Downloads]# yum list avail mate*
    Last metadata expiration chec: 0:15:35 ago on Sat 05 Oct 2019 09:17:39 PM CDT. Available Packages mate-applets.x86_64 1.20.3-2.fc28 updates mate-calc.x86_64 1.20.3-1.fc28 updates mate-control-center.i686 1.20.4-1.fc28 updates mate-control-center.x86_64 1.20.4-1.fc28 updates
    … mate-utils-common.noarch 1.20.2-1.fc28 updates mate-utils-devel.i686 1.20.2-1.fc28 updates mate-utils-devel.x86_64 1.20.2-1.fc28 updates

    I ran into trouble at this second step:
    Error:
    Problem 1: conflicting requests
    – nothing provides libgucharmap_2_90.so.7()(64bit) needed by mate-
    applet-1.20.3-2.fc28.x86_64
    Problem 2: conflicting requests
    – nothing provides libgnome-keyring.so.0()(64bit) needed by mate-
    power-manager-1.20.3-1.fc28.x86_64
    Problem 3: conflicting requests
    – nothing provides gtk2-engines needed by mate-themes-3.22-19-
    2.fc28.noarch
    – nothing provides gtk-murrine-engine needed by mate-themes-3.22.19-
    2.fc28.noarch Problem 4: conflicting requests
    – nothing provides pythin3-setproctitle needed by mate-optimus-
    19.10.3-4.el8.noarch
    – nothing provides glew needed by mate-optimus-19.10.3-4.el8.noarch Problem 5: cannot intall the best candidate for the job
    – nothing provides hddtemp needed by mate-sensors-applet-1.20.3-
    1.fc28.x86_64 (try to add ‘–skip-broken’ to skip uninstallable packages or ‘–nobest’ to use not only best candidate packages)

    Does this look familiar?

    –Doc

  • Ljubomi,

    Hooray! I re-installed CentOS 8 to a fresh VM and went through your instructions again. This time everything rebuilt and installed correctly. Thank you!

    –Doc Savage
    Fairview Heights, IL

  • Oh good! I’m going to have to try that on my experiemtal C8 VM. I have for the moment given up on it because I can barely navigate my way through Gnome and it became just too painful.

    Thanks!

  • I just rebooted fresh CentOS 8 VM after installing MATE and it is
    1.22.2, everything looks good.

  • Yeah, working great here too! Thanks to the people/person(s) who did all the hard work for us!

    I did notice while following the procedure that it failed to install pygpgme, but everything seems to be fine without it. Is it needed for something I haven’t found yet?

    Fred

  • Is gnome3 really that bad :D

    I decided to just bite the bullet and shift to real gnome3 (and not the classic) about 4 years ago. It waas different and took some time to learn .. BUT .. I can do everything I need to do now.

    I like both mate and cinnamon .. so I am not knocking either one. I just think people might be well server switching to a ‘supported’ desktop in the longer run.

    Again .. don’t get me wrong .. it’s open source, so do what makes you happy :D

  • Johnny, I’m sure it can be learned, apparently lots of people have done so and are now happy(for some values of happy) with it.

    That is just something I don’t feel like doing. I’m not against change, but the changes in Gnome 3 seemed to me to be needlessly adding pain and difficulty to what had been a perfectly usable desktop. Every time I install a new CentOS I grit my teeth at having to remember/figure out enough of it to get me thru to the point where I can use a friendly UI.

    Yes, I should stop being a luddite and learn it. but, y’know, I just can’t bring myself to deal with the pain. As a geezer, I guess I’m kinda set in my ways. :)

    Just to get the Mate installed on C8 (as was posted here recently where/how to do it) was more pain that I enjoyed going through. Now, I’m sure there are simple solutions to these issues, but I just don’t want to have to stop what I’m doing to google for them… anyway, I had firefox open and wanted a terminal window. couldn’t figure out how to set it up so I could see both at the same time. Once I maximized FF I couldn’t figure out how to get it to not eat the entire screen–no clicky buttons on the top-right of the window, so I ended up using the left-most item at the top of the window (forget what it is named…) to choose which window I wanted in front. tedious but livable.

    but now I don’t have to do that ’cause Mate works great!

    And thanks to you, Johnny, and your companions/associates for all the many YEARS of work you’ve all put in on CentOS. Even though I gripe and complain about Gnome3, I really do appreciate all you’ve done!

    Fred

  • What Fred said, Johnny. I was very happy with GNOME v2 until its developers decided to take magic mushrooms or whatever and shuffled off to Oz. If you want to use GNOME v3, great. But this thread is probably not the best place to trumpet how much you like GNOME v3. A fairly substantial group of us is trying to restore a capability (MATE) that Red Hat deliberately took away from us. I hope when you find yourself on the wrong side of a Red Hat decision you are lucky enough to have a talented and resourceful group to help you recover.

    –Doc Savage

  • If you install gnome-tweaks then you can run up the “tweaks” app. Goto the “Windows” tab and you can turn on title bar buttons, they’re down at the bottom. It may not make Gnome friendly, but it does at least reduce the amount of outright hostility shown.

  • Le 17/10/2019 à 16:08, Johnny Hughes a écrit :

    There’s an easy way to figure that out. Our local school has been 100 %
    GNU/Linux since 2010 (when we first installed CentOS 5 on desktops and servers). On the latest count, I have a hundred users there.

    Over the years, I’ve tried a variety of desktop environments, from GNOME
    2.x on CentOS 5.x and CentOS 6.x to a beefed-up Xfce. Then we tested GNOME 3 on CentOS 7.x, and it was a mild disaster. Next was KDE, and everyone loved it, since most of my users come from a Windows background, and the basic usability is vaguely similar.

    When Red Hat decided to drop KDE for the subsequent release, I decided to switch the desktop clients to OpenSUSE Leap KDE. The servers are still running CentOS (and will always be running CentOS I guess).

    I guess everyone’s happy now, because no one complains. :o)

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

  • :)

    As much as I was tempted to try Mate, I decided using Gnome might be better in the long run. Using Gnome 3 “classic” with a “startx” start which has issues in terms of everything working right as opposed to gdm, but, well, this is what I wanted to do. I just wish Gnome 3.28 was more configurable without a lot of work.

  • Hi Niki, why you choosed OpenSUSE Leap and not a distro like Fedora or Debian/Ubuntu?

    Best regards.

  • Yes, it is.

    My main reason is this (it has to do with me starting with Windows 3.1
    and those functionalities are in Windows even today I have to use and support at work):
    1. All tray icons are visible so I can see if message or mail comes without need to move more then eyeball.
    2. I can put icon on a desktop, document or link to app.
    3. I can easily see all open apps and swith to them using mouse
    4. I can put links to panel in top/bottom of the screen, visible and easily accessible.
    5. I want easily visible and accessible multiple workspaces I can switch to. I like separate opened apps several per workspace custered for a specifig (simultanious) job/task, Firefox in one Krusader in another, VM
    i third, something else in forth…Then I can switch between apps IN
    THAT workspace, I do not have to choose from dozes of windows (like with Alt+Tab)

    If Gnome 3 (Classic) can be configured to do such things in one go
    (chosing a theme “Gnome 2”) I would switch to it.

  • you should give gnome3 some time. Here is the thing. At the beginning i disliked gnome3. I tried it for 1 or 2 days and then i turned to xfce.

    I started using gnome3 when one of my friends said that it is usable if you get use to it. I also considered the fact that desktop environments like xfce have a small development team and they delay to transits to new technologies.

    I gave a try to gnome3 for a couple of weeks and it works fine. I dont even considering changing back.

  • And last but not least: I got used to some way of interaction with computer, and that way is most productive for me after very long use. I
    don’t want to blend in iPad generation, I want to stay productive which I am. So, I use Mutt (on FreeBSD, which my workstation runs, it is so easy and straightforward to install and maintain Mutt).

    Just my $0.02.

    Valeri

  • Sorry, I meant Mate (mate-desktop); I do use mutt as text mail client as well…

    —
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Nothing stopping you from using mutt on a CentOS system, regardless of what desktop environment you use, just as email clients such as Evolution and kmail can run in other desktop environments.

    It’s too bad that Mutt doesn’t support GMail’s authentication well
    (except by turning on the insecure password authentication, App Passwords are disabled in my work email account). You can kinda get it working with the oauth2 support but it requires you set up an OAuth client ID and client secret first, which I don’t have access to for work account. I really like mutt and prefer it to webmail.

  • I corrected myself, I meant above: Mate (desktop). The Desktop Environment that is behaving and interacting with me the old fashioned way I became productive using since forever.

    And no, I don’t use gmail anything, I know you are a wast majority who don’t care, so, I’ll not explain, and will stop right here.

    Valeri

  • Another (these days neo) mutt lover. I’ll take this time to spam my own http://srobb.net/mutt.html page.

    Mutt does work with gmail. Hrrm, I’m looking I see I do have the password used in my msmtprc file. If one just uses a very simple muttrc file file, it will also work but require the password.

    set SMTP_url=”smtp://scott@gmail.com@smtp.gmail.com:587″
    set SMTP_pass=”scottisawesome”
    set ssl_starttls=yes

    I feel that everyone should use scottisawesome as their password though some foolish people disagree. But (I am not 100% sure) it seems that those
    3 lines were all I needed back when I did it that way (Nowadays I have a slightly more complex setup as I have too many email accounts like everyone else in the world).

  • Guys, I corrected myself: I meant Mate desktop above (related to somebody’s list of reasons why he needs Desktop environment – DE – he needs). However, someone’s creative editing threw away context, namely that what I said was related to DE descussion.

    Thanks for hints about mutt which I use. Hints may be helpfult to those who use gmail, not me who doesn’t use google anything. I skip mentioning why, as you, vast majority do use google, and don’t care about the reasons why I don’t.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • If I was the creative editor I most sincerely apologize. It wasn’t my aim to change meaning, I trim in an effort to make it easier for others to read stuff. So if it was me, feel free to chastize me either publicly or privately and please accept my apologie. Most sincerely,
    —
    Scott Robbins PGP keyID EB3467D6
    ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
    gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-keys EB3467D6

  • I will not: I did receive so many great advises from you, so I’m in such debt, I will never be able to re-pay. Only by trying to help others when I can following what you do.

    Thanks a lot for everything!

    Valeri

    and please accept my apologie.

    —
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • And the above is my typical trimming. I’m glad that my feeble brain has been able to help at times. :)

  • Doesn’t matter. Work uses gmail (Google Apps for Education) and so I
    literally have no choice.

  • Of course I’m aware that mutt an use IMAP and SMTP passwords.

    So, there are hosted Gmail services, and you can turn on/off certain settings. One of the settings you can turn off is App Passwords
    (which means you’d have to use your main password for IMAP/SMTP) and it is considered a security risk to have IMAP/SMTP passwords enabled, so I have it turned off.

    Most high-level email clients let you set up authentication by using Google’s OAuth2 endpoint. Mutt has some very minimal support for this, but it requires creating your own custom google client IDs and secrets, and I don’t have access to the domain to do that.

  • Ljubomi –

    A couple of minor tweaks:

    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv yum –skip-broken install mate\* -x mate\*devel\* -x mate-menu -x mate-optimus\*
    yum groupinstall “MATE” –skip-broken vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv yum groupinstall “MATE Desktop” –skip-broken –exclude “*logos*”

    but otherwise working. Decided that I should see whether I could get MATE working on CentOS 8 before fiddling with Xfce. I now have a usable CentOS 8 desktop. Thank you!

    Cheers, Dave

  • But hey, why in the world you want it easy when you can have it complicated, super modern and sucking your work time?

    As you, I’m trying to keep my life ungoogled as much as I can. Just to explain it has always been a pain. I’ll use your words above in future :-)

    Regards, Simon

  • Saw that but I wanted to work through your original process with MATE
    before trying the same approach with Xfce  The good news is that I got the same results but with Xfce.  One different tweak to get around some additional conflicts between Fedora 28 Xfce and CentOS 8 Gnome:

    yum groupinstall “Xfce” –skip-broken –exclude “*adwaita-gtk2-theme*”
    yum groupinstall “Xfce Desktop” –skip-broken –exclude “*adwaita-gtk2-theme*” –exclude”*logos*”

    Also, I skipped the step analogous to:

    yum install mate* -x mate*devel* -x mate-menu

    since it seemed to be redundant with doing the group installs.  So, I
    now have two CentOS 8 VMs with neither using Gnome 3.

    Thanks again!!!

    Cheers, Dave

    —
    “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.”

    — Benjamin Franklin

  • Very nice. I’ll see to post this in CentOS group on Facebook.

    —
    Ljubomir Ljubojevic
    (Love is in the Air)
    PL Computers Serbia, Europe

    StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant

  • I have also got MATE 1.22.2 running, but I don’t have access to Printer configuration in MATE. I have to go back to the standard gui to do that. My printers are Brother MFC-J6520DW and MFC-J6930DW installed from the Brother supplied software using cups. Have I missed something in the install of MATE?

  • I think it’s missing. On CentOS 7 that functionality is provided by the system-config-printer rpm, as seen here:

    system-config-printer-1.4.1-21.el7.x86_64
    system-config-printer-libs-1.4.1-21.el7.noarch

    system-config-printer is the actual gui program.

    On CentOS 8 the only system-config-printer rpms appear to be this:

    system-config-printer-udev-1.5.11-13.el8.x86_64
    system-config-printer-libs-1.5.11-13.el8.noarch

    Neither of those is the system-config-printer gui.

    So it appears to be missing.

  • The corresponding system-config-printer rpm from Fedora 28 appears to work.  Not the best solution but a solution.

    Cheers, Dave

    —
    “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.”

    — Benjamin Franklin

  • But no longer available that I can find. I presume it must be version
    1.5.11-13 to match the -lib version

    —
    Cheers Bill

  • Thanks everyone for the suggestion. I’ve installed system-config-printer and also browsed localhost:631
    On the whole I prefer the localhost:631 as it seems more complete and doesn’t require any tweaks. Hey, I’m even getting to like Gnome 3 (classic mode) a bit. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

    —
    Cheers Bill