MATE could soon replace the old GNOME 2 desktop environment

Aug 23, 2016 21:58 GMT  ·  By

Alexander Pyhalov from the OpenIndiana development team was happy to announce the availability of the latest MATE 1.14 open-source desktop environment for the Solaris-derived operating system.

It's been a long time since we wrote something here about the OpenIndiana project, which apparently is still being actively developed and receives some of the newest GNU and Open Source technologies, such as the MATE 1.14 desktop environment, for which the development team created a special meta-package to ease the entire installation process. But it looks like there's a small conflict with the GNOME 2 desktop.

"We are pleased to announce that MATE 1.14 is available in OI now. To facilitate installing, we’ve created pkg:/mate_install meta-package. 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," said Alexander Pyhalov in the announcement.

MATE to soon replace GNOME 2 in OpenIndiana's ISOs

If you don't have time to install the MATE 1.14 desktop environment on your OpenIndiana operating system, you can at least help the team test the Live ISO and USB images they've prepared with MATE as default graphical interface. They are available for download right now from http://dlc-int.openindiana.org/hipster/20160816/, along with the Minimal, Text, and GUI (with GNOME 2) ISO/USB images.

They want to know what you think about the MATE desktop on OpenIndiana, so don't be shy, grab the ISOs, take them for a test drive, and send some feedback. If feedback is positive, they'll try to finally replace the old GNOME 2 ISOs with this one for the GUI flavor of the upcoming OpenIndiana Hipster snapshot.