MATE 1.20 Test Build For CentOS 7 Available

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Hi everyone,

There’s been discussions in the past about updating MATE RPMs in EPEL-7:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id36260
https://lists.CentOS.org/pipermail/CentOS/2019-August/173154.html
(and lots of others…)

As a proof-of-concept, I’ve written some scripts that clone specific commits from the Fedora master branches, and then runs a tool to re-apply RPM scriptlets that are required by EL7 but removed from the Fedora .spec files.

The scripts are available at:
https://github.com/gebailey/mate-rpms/tree/master/1.20/el7

There’s also instructions there if you want to try upgrading to MATE
1.20 w/o rebuilding them yourself.

If these packages work for others, perhaps we can revisit the idea of updating the epel7 branches of the Fedora git repos and submitting an official update.

There’s nothing here (yet) about building MATE 1.22 (which might require a newer gcc for EL7), or building anything on CentOS 8, but thought the CentOS 7 users might find this helpful.

-Greg

17 thoughts on - MATE 1.20 Test Build For CentOS 7 Available

  • Greg Bailey writes:

    I’ve had 1.20 running on CentOS7 for a while, based on my own updates to the 1.16 rpms from EPEL.

    Not so lucky for mate 1.22. Updating my own rpms to 1.22 as well as a rebuild of the Fedora 30 rpms do not create functional rpms. Some components work, some don’t.

  • Hello Greg,

    [snip]

    Nice to see such effort (and sorry I’m very late), did you appear to have maintained that to follow more recent MATE versions?

    Regards,

  • Hello Greg,

    Thanks for your quick response! I’ll try building from the sources while I’m stuck with C7 :-).

    Regards,

  • H writes:

    Versions newer than 1.20 don’t build on 7. Or, rather, they build but don’t result in a stable system.

    A newer gcc might work, but I’ve never tried that as I also moved on to 8.

    Rocky, that is.

  • On another note, the version that is available for C7, Mate 1.16.2, does not save all sessions when it crashes, nor does it save positions or session order arrangement on the bar. This means that every time the computer is restarted you have to spend time arranging your desktop working environment… I have not found any utility to do this for me either.

    Quite annoying, particularly since I remember that even OS/2 saved the desktop perfectly upon shutdown.

    Does Mate 1.20 do better in this regards?

  • I use Mate, currently on C8 but previously on C7 and I’ve never had this problem.

    I just have a single panel bar at the bottom (like Gnome version 1) and arrange it to suit me and it stays the way I want it between sessions. Every time I log in I see the same panel bar that I saw the last time I logged in.

    Is this the problem you’re having? If so you might want to use dconf-editor to lock the panel bar and see if that solves it.

  • Hi, I have been using it for about a week and I have not found any problems, but only one: when I use 3 monitor /a notebook, and two lcd/, sometimes the display was frozen. I think, it is better, then 1.16, but I didn’t find a huge difference in use, maybe it more responsive, and look likes better ☺

    –Fonya

  • Couple of questions:

    – Which exact version of Mate are you running?

    – Do you have a HiDPI display? That is one of the reasons I am interested in a version later than 1.16 which has lots of issues on such a laptop display?

    – You say it is better (apart from freezing your display which is not good), how so?

    – Did you download Mate 1.20? If so, from where?

    – Or, did you compile it yourself?

    Thanks!

  • Yes although I have multiple workspaces, each, of course, with its own set of windows. I want each workspace to open with the exact same windows, terminal windows or graphic applications, with the icons in the same order on the panel bar and the application windows placed in the same location on the desktop as when used last.

    Did Mate 1.20 under C7 do that for you? I end up with not quite the same number of windows on each workspace and not arranged in the last-used order on the panel bar…

    I will look at dconf-editor which I am not familiar with.

  •  dbind-WARNING **: 14:40:01.469: Couldn’t connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-IU3DS9yULv: Connection refused

    ** (dconf-editor:33157): WARNING **: 14:40:01.594: source-manager.vala:108: The following schemas:
      org.mate.terminal.profiles
      org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner contain neither keys nor children.

    Not sure what they are trying to tell me (apart from the text in the message itself…)?

  • mate-desktop-1.20.4-2.el7.x86_64

    How can I exactly recognise hidp display? I had used multiple monitor with docking station /I have a Dell Latitude 7480, with thunderbolt docking station, audio, video, and network connections/

    With subjective feeling, and usage. Smoother display, better response, I can resize windows more than one pixel border. Bigger version number
    ☺ I had no particular reason to upgrade, I just wanted to it.

    I compiled by hand, using the know-how, and scripts from https://github.com/gebailey/mate-rpms

    Yes, I compile it myself. The libs, and build environment a little bit updated by hand, I try to compile mate 1.24 first, from fedora packageges, but I’m stuck with some libs, and tetex version, and I had give up.

  • I have tried to use session save/restore from http://blog.thewebsitepeople.org/2013/07/gnome-session-save-and-restore/ and I believe it uses wmctrl which is a rather old program.

    Although session save says it saved a session, session restore does not restore all windows to the four desktops in the order they were on the panel…

    I did look at dconf-editor but despite doing some Googling, it is not clear to me how I can use it to save a particular setup with respect to the specific windows on the desktops and the order on the panel for each desktop.

    Do you have any pointer to where I might be able to find this information?

  • I am back with this issue again. xorg crashed for me today and I had to restore all window sessions. While “session restore 1/2” restored most of the windows, including terminal windows, it (1) failed to distribute them correctly on my four desktops, (2) failed to place them correctly on the desktops, and (3) failed to restore the correct order of window icons on the bottom panel.

    I have to admit I am surprised there are no third-party programs that do this…