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Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

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VentGrey
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Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#1 Post by VentGrey »

Im going to get this straight, i found out that in most distros it's possible to upgrade your MATE desktop environment to the 1.14 version, im currently running Debian 8.4 Jessie, is it possible to upgrade to MATE 1.14 without having to install Unstable or Testing?
I would exchange everything I know in exchange for half of what I don't.

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#2 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

VentGrey wrote:im currently running Debian 8.4 Jessie, is it possible to upgrade to MATE 1.14 without having to install Unstable or Testing?
No.

EDIT: Upgrade your system, we're up to 8.5 now.

https://www.debian.org/News/2016/20160604
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#3 Post by VentGrey »

That was quick xD thanks a lot.
I would exchange everything I know in exchange for half of what I don't.

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paschalis.sp
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#4 Post by paschalis.sp »

We are now on 8.6 and still no Mate Desktop update.... Is it safe to use the testing repository 1.14? Note that some applets are failing to update, i.e. mate-weather applet... :(

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#5 Post by GarryRicketson »

Is it safe to use the testing repository 1.14? Note that some applets are failing to update, i.e. mate-weather applet
If you are using Debian stable ,(now 8.6) , NO, it is not a good idea
to start using the "testing repos", and mixing them with the "stable" repos,you should be using the "stable" repos.
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Looking at mine, which I just recently updated,and upgraded, (Sept 17)
All the mate packages upgraded to : 1.8 and 1.8.1

There is no real "mate-weather applet", the weather "applet" is
included in the "mate-applets" package, on my system, after
the upgrade, it is 1.8.1,
Are you confused about "updates" , maybe ?
See

Code: Select all

man apt-get
Read about "update", and then "upgrade",....simply running

Code: Select all

apt-get update
does not upgrade anything, it just reloads the package information,
from:'man apt-get':
update
update is used to resynchronize the package index files from
their sources. The indexes of available packages are fetched
from the location(s) specified in /etc/apt/sources.list. For
example, when using a Debian archive, this command retrieves and
scans the Packages.gz files, so that information about new and
updated packages is available. An update should always be
performed before an upgrade or dist-upgrade. Please be aware
that the overall progress meter will be incorrect as the size of
the package files cannot be known in advance.

upgrade
upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages
currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in
/etc/apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new
versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no
circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or
packages not already installed retrieved and installed. New
versions of currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded
without changing the install status of another package will be
left at their current version. An update must be performed first
so that apt-get knows that new versions of packages are
available.

if your package information is not showing the newer versions, and
you have tried updating, something is wrong,...

If you simply must have the shiniest newest versions, you could
upgrade your system to "testing",
OR
Also you might want to check the
"jessie backports"
You are running Debian stable because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: The software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That is where backports come in.
I do not know if there is any newer versions of the mate desktop utilities or
not, you should be able to check on that your self, "search" a little.
--------------- edited --------------------
No need to bother searching, I tried it myself , added jessie-backports to my sources.list, but the current version available is still 1.8. ---
Last edited by GarryRicketson on 2016-09-26 18:13, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#6 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

paschalis.sp wrote:We are now on 8.6 and still no Mate Desktop update....
There will *never* be an update to the MATE version in Debian jessie.

Please familiarise yourself with the nature of Debian releases.

And no, mixing repositories in Debian stable is not a good idea,

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=114130

Have you considered Arch or Fedora instead?
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#7 Post by stevepusser »

The best you are going to get is an unoffical backport: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... =mate+1.14

Note that I might be inspired to try and make another repository with a newer MATE, too...
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#8 Post by NFT5 »

GarryRicketson wrote:If you simply must have the shiniest newest versions, you could
upgrade your system to "testing",
I think you'll find that he just wants his weather back rather than a case of SNS syndrome. He did have the sense to ask.
Head_on_a_Stick wrote:There will *never* be an update to the MATE version in Debian jessie.
It's not so much an update that's required here - just a fix. Being without the weather panel applet drives me nuts too but it looks like, now that the rest of the world has moved to MATE 1.14 or above, Debian's "stability" is working against those of us running 1.8 in Jessie. I haven't found any indication that 1.8 will be fixed like the later versions have been and any "fixes" out there involve risk that those of us wanting stability are/may not be prepared to take. Even stevepusser notes that his unofficial backport comes with no guarantees.

It's the nature of the Debian beast. Debian is saying that it's a problem for MATE while MATE is saying that the version in Jessie is too old to bother about, something that the Debian devs probably agree with at this point in time as their focus shifts to moving Stretch to stable and fixing an issue as "minor" as this ranks very low in their priorities.

Personally I find it a bit annoying that there is more attention paid to moving forward than to the needs of the current user base, but that's just how it is. :(

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#9 Post by GarryRicketson »

I think you'll find that he just wants his weather back------
Ok well , if that is the case,

Actually there is weather applets in the current version of mate,
mate-applets 1.8.0
Various applets for the MATE panel
---------------------

Invest: downloads current stock quotes from the Internet and displays
the quotes in a scrolling display in the applet. The applet downloads the
stock information from Yahoo! Finance.

System monitor: CPU, memory, network, swap file and resource.

Trash: lets you drag items to the trash folder.

Weather report: downloads weather information from the U.S National Weather
Service (NWS) servers, including the Interactive Weather Information
Network (IWIN).

This package contains the architecture independent files.
The reason it is gone is not because the current mate version does not have the
applet, but take a look at this, : Weather Applet (Weather Report 1.8.1) Dead?
I'm glad to see that this problem was the consequence of a defunct web site.

When I noticed that both the desktop and laptop were not showing the weather I thought the feature was eliminated for some reason.

Thanks Monsta for looking into this - looking forward to its return.
I think this could be fixed simply by finding the right file (library ?) and modify
it to look some where else for the weather reports, ----------

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#10 Post by NFT5 »

Yes, just a defunct web site but while it's been fixed in Mint (also in Ubuntu Mate) they are both using MATE 1.14, not 1.8 as we have in Jessie.

Every few weeks, when not having the weather annoys me enough (my business is somewhat weather dependent), I have a hunt around the webs for a solution. Haven't found one for 1.8 yet, and although stevepusser's solution may be the best, even he warns that it may have issues. On that basis I'm not prepared to take the risk on my stable system.

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#11 Post by stevepusser »

Edit: I tested the following solution, and it didn't work--so then I did the full 1.14.2 upgrade as in the other thread, after I fixed a couple install bugs I discovered just now.

Well, if all you need is the Jessie mate-applets package rebuilt against the working libmateweather from Stretch, I set up its own repo: https://software.opensuse.org/download. ... te-applets

It's rather simple to revert to the standard Jessie mate-applets if this doesn't fix anything.

As always, all the commands in the instructions should be run as root or with sudo. If this works, it could be something to suggest to the regular jessie-backports guys.

I also made a new mate-1.14.2 repo which has the updated packages from Stretch since I did the first one. This also incorporates the ~bpo80 in the versions, which allows for upgrading to the same version in Stretch if you upgrade in place, like the jessie-backports packages do. I'll delete the original Mate repo and update instructions in the original thread.

By the way, you can run

Code: Select all

curl wttr.in
in the terminal to get an ascii weather report for your location. Or just "wttr.in" in your browser's address bar. I'll leave it as an exercise to find out how to get the Moon's current phase. :)

See https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#12 Post by kaddy »

@stevepusser

Thanks A LOT for packaing Mate 1.16 recently with the open suse build service... I'm currently running it thanks to your repo and so far everything seems to work great :D

I am intrigued on learning how you packaged Mate with the build service... and how complex was it or was it rather easy with this tool?

Any chance on sharing some information, links / tutorials on the steps required to package Mate with the OBS?

Cheers

kaddy

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#13 Post by stevepusser »

kaddy wrote:@stevepusser

Thanks A LOT for packaing Mate 1.16 recently with the open suse build service... I'm currently running it thanks to your repo and so far everything seems to work great :D

I am intrigued on learning how you packaged Mate with the build service... and how complex was it or was it rather easy with this tool?

Any chance on sharing some information, links / tutorials on the steps required to package Mate with the OBS?

Cheers

kaddy
I guess you must have found that repository by exploring, so good for you! I just built it a few days ago, then tried adding it to a Live session in Virtual Box of MX 15, but Mate 1.16 just came up with the wallpaper and nothing else, so I haven't explored it any longer. (Lots of other stuff cooking) It might be due to some gtk2 setting shipped with MX 15. Anyway, I haven't published the 1.16 repo yet.

Did you just upgrade a stock Jessie Mate version? It looks pretty much the same as 1.8, correct?

Anyway, I pulled the Trusty (14.04) PPA source packages from the Mate 1.16 repository here: https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf

Once you get to a PPA's home page, you click on the link on that PPA for technical information, which then shows a couple new links. Click on the first link and then you can drill down into the pool directory for each package source, and then download the orig.tar.xx for each package, plus its debian.tar.xz file. I then modified the debian/changelog file to add a new stanza with the versioning I wanted, generated new source packages, and uploaded them into a new repository on the OBS. A couple of them had build failures that I managed to fix, but I don't know if this is due to some quirk specific to the OBS or not.

I'm eventually going to write a guide for Debian and Ubuntu users to use the OBS for backport creation and repo hosting, since I really couldn't really find anything online. Before this, I tried to set up a PPA for my Pale Moon packages, using Ubuntu in a virtual machine, but never succeeded in that--I found the OBS pretty easy once I understood its quirks. I'm still learning things about it myself by trial and error; the web interface has quite a few links and buttons to play with, so I'll have to include an annotated screenshot of that. But if you want to start a new thread about trying some backport, such as Gnumeric 1.12.32 from Stretch, which I know will work, I'll help you walk through it--then you can add your new repo to the HOWTO section here as a way to get that backport. First you just need to sign up for an account at the OBS, which is straightforward, and your home project will be your first set of repositories. Other separate sets of repositories can be added later as Subprojects if desired.

I didn't really have much difficulty creating the OBS repo for 1.16; the only challege was the couple of packages that had build failures, so I had to play Sherlock and hunt down a fix for those. Otherwise, it was basically doing the same thing over about forty times, and pasting some boilerplate text into the new stanza in debian/changelog for each package. Gnumeric will just require three packages, so that won't be as bad.

Other Debian users might be grateful for a Gnumeric backport, since it seems to fix at least one major issue: http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/viewtop ... 21&t=40565
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#14 Post by kaddy »

stevepusser wrote:Did you just upgrade a stock Jessie Mate version? It looks pretty much the same as 1.8, correct?
Yeah upgraded a stock Jessie with Mate 1.8. No visibly noticeable difference I spose but I wanted it because of better gtk3 support and a few features not present in the prior version. All packages seemed to have upgraded nicely...

Thanks for the info about rebuilding the sources from PPA's... i've done that before for simple packages... but now I'm going to have to play with rebuilding an entire desktop environment such as mate / xfce against a stable debian.. that will come in very handy in the future. I suppose one could also just grap the deb.src's from the debian unstable / testing branch and compile them against a stable debian environment (aka backporting) for all the packages required in Mate and do it that way too... I'll give it a go for the fun of it :D
stevepusser wrote: I'm eventually going to write a guide for Debian and Ubuntu users to use the OBS for backport creation and repo hosting, since I really couldn't really find anything online
Oh mate... PLEASE do that... and link us up in future :) I can also give that info quite a bit of attention on my youtube channel "Linux4UnMe" to inform people... will give credits to you...

kaddy

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#15 Post by stevepusser »

I already did xfce 4.12 for the Wheezy and Jessie bases in the MX 14 and MX 15 repositories a while ago. (see my sig :) )

I updated a Jessie MATE netinstall to my 1.16 in a virtual machine, and it does seem to be all right! No smoke or fire, anyway..

So for the public, the instructions to add that 1.16 repository are here: https://software.opensuse.org/download. ... nvironment

if you want the repo in its own file; otherwise the address to add manually to your sources is

Code: Select all

deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/stevenpusser:/MATE-1.16/Debian_8.0/ /
Then you just do an

Code: Select all

# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
to upgrade your MATE, followed by, if it works, the superior dance in front of the distro users stuck on 1.14.
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#16 Post by kaddy »

kaddy wrote:# apt-get dist-upgrade
Probably not a good idea to run dist-upgrade while using your repo... on my machine all is fine with a normal "apt-get upgrade" but running an "apt-get dist-upgrade" makes it want to downgrade from mate 1.16 back down to mate 1.8x.
Maybe there is a priority setting in Debian to get rid of that.

EDIT

I setup apt-pinning by creating a "preferences" file in /etc/apt with the following:

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700


Package: *
Pin: release a=stable-updates
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=jessie-backports
Pin-Priority: 300

Now apt isn't trying to downgrade my mate-desktop anymore with apt-get dist-upgrade.

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#17 Post by stevepusser »

Thanks for the feedback! I currently have a collection of annotated screenshots of the OBS interface as we walk through an example backport of Gnumeric 1.12.32 from Stretch to Jessie, and have about half the text written. (I used Hotshots for the screenshots and annotations--it doesn't drag in a truckload of GNOME dependencies like Shutter. I guess I should do a Debian port of Hotshots, too, since it's not in any repo. Jeesh, I could write a zillion HOWTOs to get stuff not in backports...)
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#18 Post by stevepusser »

bump: added mate-tweak 16.10.5 to the 1.16 repo.
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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#19 Post by kaddy »

Look forward to the blog / tutorial :)


oh yeah... I forgot there was a "mate-tweak" tool. Haven't used Mate / Gnome 2 in a long time. Cheers

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Re: Mate 1.14 on Debian Jessie?

#20 Post by stevepusser »

Here's the first section: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=130057

First thing to do is sign up on the OBS, then you get assigned your home project. The website is often slow to respond to input; maybe a lot of people are stressing it.
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