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.

We also prepared test Live DVD ISOs/USB images with MATE, which are available at http://dlc-int.openindiana.org/hipster/20160816/ (OI_MATE_experimental.iso/usb). Note that these USB images don’t longer require 1G/2G header file, and can be directly dd’ed to USB stick.

Also we prepared one new image – OI_minimal, where we tried to strip down OI a bit. We would be glad if you to tested them.

Thanks to Till Wegmüller, who made a lot to make Mate available on OI and to Ken Mays who helped him in his task.

We want to know your opinion on Mate and install images. The current plan is to deliver minimal, GUI (Gnome2) and Mate images for the next OpenIndiana Hipster snapshot and later drop Gnome2 image.

Also we are interested to hear if community needs VM images, and if it needs, then what exactly (qcow2, vmdk or something else).

Details are available in this announcement.